Someone in Midtown Manhattan climbed a bucket lift after the comeback itself and screamed “party like it’s 1973,” and I need you to understand that this is not a punchline — this is a man doing load-bearing emotional labor on behalf of an entire city.
Ten thousand people flooded Midtown. A yellow cab on 7th Avenue got its windshield caved in by fans using their belts as weapons. Street signs were ripped from the ground. According to ABC News, NYPD made 15 arrests and issued 41 summonses — 56 total. Ten officers injured, including one who caught a glass bottle in the face. CitiBikes destroyed. Smoke bombs. Eggs pelted at Victor Wembanyama at the team hotel, because sure, why not, the night was young.
This is what happens when a city banks 53 years of deferred championship insanity at compound interest.
I’ve been a Knicks fan my whole life — the full Bergen County experience, the years of watching Isiah Thomas dismantle the franchise from the inside, the Dolan ownership era that made rooting for this team feel like a psychological condition requiring treatment. And the thing is, the suffering wasn’t passive. Every season we got our hopes up a little and then had them removed surgically. That’s not emptiness. That’s accumulation. By 2026, this fanbase had been marinating in its own unhinged energy for half a century, and Anunoby’s game-winner just popped the lid.
The smashed cab is not a crime story. The smashed cab is a thermometer.
Down 29 points in the third quarter — 76-47, if you want to see it written out in a way that causes physical pain — the Knicks came back and won 107-106. Brunson went 12-for-25, got to the line eleven times, and hit a three with two minutes left that made it a one-possession game. OG Anunoby tipped in the winner with 1.2 seconds on the clock. The Knicks lead the series 3-1. One win from a title they haven’t held since Nixon was in office.
Brunson, God bless him, walked out of Madison Square Garden and said this:
https://twitter.com/ESPNNBA/status/2064946755272143158
“Not even close” is the correct energy from a player. It is not the correct energy to deploy on 10,000 people who just watched the largest comeback in NBA Finals history in real time. Those people were not going home quietly. Mayor Mamdani — who had been feuding with Dolan over a canceled watch party just days earlier — called the post-game chaos “unacceptable”. He’s not wrong, technically. He’s also a man who lives in a city where yellow cab smashings on 7th Avenue are, evidently, how we express love now.
The Mounted Unit got deployed. The Strategic Response Group came out. Gothamist reported loudspeakers blasting warnings at 36th and 8th. Scaffolding climbed. Fireworks in the streets.
And that’s for a series win that hasn’t happened yet.
If this team actually closes it out in Game 5 — if Brunson hits the shot and the Garden explodes and the confetti drops and 53 years of this end on a Tuesday night in June — I genuinely do not know what this city does. There are no frames of reference. The last time the Knicks won a title, the Mets had won the World Series four years earlier and the Jets had won the Super Bowl that same season. New Yorkers in 1973 had recent emotional support systems. We have nothing. We are going in cold.
My dog Revis is going to sleep through whatever happens. I will not be that lucky.
