Worth It

It was all worth it.

Last night, at around six o’clock pm, my older daughter told me she had a surprise for me.

I’ll preface this by saying that my daughter has never been interested in watching basketball with her dear old dad despite my early attempts to get her into the sport. I realized pretty fast that I was ice skating uphill and never pushed my luck.

If anything, I felt fortunate that she didn’t dislike the Knicks for taking me away from her as often as they did. Goodness knows I couldn’t blame her if she did.

But over the last few weeks, as watching this magical, improbable run has become a family affair in the Macri household, for the first time in her life, she has shown interest in the team that helps daddy make his living. It has been a delightful surprise, made even better by the fact that she seems to genuinely enjoy watching.

Even so, I was shocked when I saw her emerge from her bedroom last night with this:

Don’t pay any mind the second apostrophe. We’re still working on the finer points of grammar, writer to daughter. Overall, I think the bubble letters are pretty strong, and I love the joinder of orange and blue within. Admittedly, I may be biased.

I put the sign up behind me for the live watch along we did, which turned into a hate watch not long after tip off. By the middle of the second quarter, when it became clear that this was not the sort of game worth keeping our kids up late for on a school night, my wife Dolores took them to bed. To her credit, she tried to stay up even as the team was down big, but eventually gave in to her own exhaustion.

That it, of course, until she was awoken by some very loud noises emanating from the basement. Thankfully she was the only member of the household whose sleep was disturbed by my outburst, although part of me wished the kids had woken up as well.

Over the last year, starting with the 2025 playoffs and running right up until today, I’ve started to think about sports and family as part of the same conversation. It started when my dad, who introduced me to the Knicks, passed away a little more than a year ago. It forced me to examine myself as a father, and whether my energy and attention was too divided for their needs. This precipitated the decision to leave teaching and take on KFS as a full time gig. Over the course of this season, I’ve still struggled to find the right balance between these competing interests, and no matter which way I turn, I inevitably feel like something or someone is getting short-changed. There are times I’ve wondered if it was all worth it, usually when I feel like I’m failing at both.

And then, on the same night my beautiful, perfect, amazing Scarlett Rae gave me this sign, the Knicks gave me one of the five greatest moments of my life.

Not only is this not hyperbole, but I didn’t even need to think very hard about the list, as four of the five were already set in stone. The births of my girls, the day I got engaged, and the day I got married will always have their spots secured. I’m sure if you’d have asked me about No. 5 before last night, I would have come up with an answer that had something to do with sports, but trying to pick just one of several dozen to hold that sacred position would have been a fool’s errand. There were just too many contenders on roughly equal footing.

Until last night.

Game 4 of the 2026 NBA Finals was, without question, the greatest moment of my life as sports fan. It stood side by side with the days Scarlett and Isabelle were born, which were largely filled with stress, anxiety and a great deal of pain for my wife, but ended with the most unbridled joy imanginable.

How fitting.

It was an equally perfect compliment to my engagement and wedding days as well, because I have only ever had two true loves of my life. One is betrothed to me by law, the other by something that can only be defined by hopeless obsession. The fact that I can tell you exactly where I was when New York drafted Maciej Lampe, and how I was certain he would be the next great Knick, is not accompanied by a marriage certificate per se, but that’s only because the divorce rate is high enough as it is.

Speaking of my better half, you would think that Dolores, being of sound mind and body, would have taken issue with being woken up from her deep sleep last night. She certainly did at first, with a healthy dose of confusion on top because she knew the score of the game before she fell asleep. And then she looked at the TV, and read the words “Greatest Comeback In NBA Finals History” written across the bottom of the screen, and confusion begat more confusion, because how in the world could they have won that game?

And then, like a light bulb turning on, she got it. No explanation needed. I had lost my mind because the Knicks done went and lost theirs. As the person in this world who knows me the best, she realized instantly that I had experienced a religious event even though she didn’t witness the sacrament in the moment.

Talk about irony. We did see it, and we still didn’t believe it.

In those few seconds, as I tried to gain some modicum of composure, my mind instantly flipped back to this duality I’ve been pondering for the last year. For a win to mean so much to so many, I wondered: How can we not describe our fandom as an extension of our family? They are two sides of the same coin. Only our families and our teams can make us feel this wide a range of emotions. Sometimes, on those rarest of occasions, we feel the entire range in a single night. Those are the ones that stay with you. Those are the ones you never forget.

Well, we got one. Did we ever get one.

By the grace of God and Ogugua (although maybe not in that order), the Knicks created a memory that will be shared for decades between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives. They reminded us why we give so much of ourselves to this indescribable passion. Why we take time away from our loved ones to check scores on our phone, or duck out of a dinner to watch a game at the bar, or spend 100 nights a year arguing into a microphone about the Tao of Thibodeau instead of reading bedtime stories or watching that new show like we did when we first got married.

These are real sacrifices, and ones we all have to reconcile with in our own way. The balance isn’t always perfect, and sometimes we let losses get to us more than they should, but those pitfalls are offset by the joy we share together when a night like last night takes place. When the impossible became possible. When fantasy became reality. When an alien crash landed into the middle of midtown. When a kid from Christ the King became a legend.

The best part is that we got to experience this night as an entire community, not only comprised of relatives by blood, but extended family that reaches across city, state, country and continental lines. Last night, an entire world of die hards who bleed orange and blue held hands and jumped off the same cliff in unison. We all know magic when we see it. We know how rare it is. We know not to take it for granted. We know it is a dish best eaten family style.

I will go to bed tonight this morning feeling luckier than I ever have, save for the four days I mentioned above, not only because I get to share this moment with all of you, but because I know what awaits me not long after I hit send.

At about 7:15 am, I will see my daughter who made me that sign, and she’ll see the smile on my face, and she’ll instantly know what she slept through. She’ll laugh, and we’ll hug, and she’ll pull away and say “wait, how many points were they down by?” and I’ll laugh, and I’ll tell her, and she’ll give me that look of bright eyed wonder that only a child can produce.

I can see her face now as my own face wells up with tears I didn’t know I had left.

Out of the mouths of babes:

Let’s. Go. KNICKS.