Knicks Take
“There it is again, that funny feeling. That funny feeling.” – Bo Burnham
A familiar sensation rose within me as the New York Knicks clawed their way into the Eastern Conference Finals. I’ve lived in Knicks City for more than a decade, but arrived here as a Warriors fan and wound up an NBA agnostic.
Yet as Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, and especially Karl-Anthony Towns pushed their way into the penultimate round for the first time in 25 years, my interest and emotional investment traveled with them. I felt anticipatory anxiety for their playoff games. I felt a low-level disappointment when they tripped over themselves in Game 1 of the ECF. I definitely felt euphoria when KAT actually realized his potential and helped demolish a 20-point deficit in Game 3.
That funny feeling — that anxiety, satisfaction, optimism and worry — is simply the experience of sports fandom. It’s an emotional ride that I surfed throughout my late teens and early 20s with the San Francisco area teams. It was the interest and expertise that created a career for me in sports journalism.
This was the feeling I lost by turning my passion into a career. Sports became an intellectual exercise for me. The emotional element was dead. The beleaguered Knicks, of all the teams in the world, revived it in me. Announcing this to Knicks fans exploded their long-tortured minds.
