As a fan, I am a catastrophist. What can go wrong will go wrong. This is how I am constructed. In the wake of OG’s miracle shot, what would follow was so obvious. On the brink of elimination, the Spurs would learn from their self-immolation and grow a strategic brain to match their undeniable skills. They would play smarter. They would surely win Game Five at home, pick up some momentum, defy the odds back at the Garden, and then, riding high, take the whole damn series and the trophy. Of course that would happen.
It had happened before. Warriors fans will not soon forget that, in 2016, with a team led by the Splash Brothers, Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, they were up three to one and on the brink of a parade, too. And then it all came crashing down, thanks to a certain LeBron James. The Cavs took the series, leaving behind an indelible image: LeBron sprinting down the court and swatting from behind a shot by Andre Iguodala. (The musically oriented will recall the Nicki Minaj-DJ Khaled version of the moment: “Any baller tryna score, check them shot clocks / But I hit ’em with them ’Bron-Iguodala blocks.”)
So, yes. For the Knicks, it could all go very bad in a hurry. The truth is, the Spurs could have taken all four of those first games. Every one of them. And so, in the run-up to Game Five, I started having nightmares of Wemby, with his velociraptor arms, whacking away Knicks’ shots, receiving lobbed passes from his guards and dunking the ball as easily as most men dunk a donut. Or maybe, just to make me even more miserable, he’d go on standing thirty feet out, draining threes. In the end, he’d take the stand and accept the series M.V.P. trophy on his home court.
It was all too much to bear and foresee. Clearly, as a fan, I needed some diversion.
And so on Friday night, I turned on the MSG Network, the cable station that carries Knicks games through the regular season. They were showing just what any anxious fan with a bad case of the butterflies required—a replay of the last time the Knicks won the title.
May 10, 1973. The Knicks were up three games to one against an aging, but still daunting, Los Angeles Lakers team. The original video of that game had been damaged and lost for some time, but then, after many years, it was retrieved and painstakingly restored—incompletely, but just enough to get the gist, as with the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Gnostic gospels. Despite the occasional blurriness and missing bits, it was fully suggestive of the great historical event.
I was fourteen then. But like everyone else in the New York area at the time, I was unable to watch it in real time. The game, which was played in the afternoon at the “Fabulous Forum,” in L.A., was not broadcast live to New Yorkers. The N.B.A. wasn’t very popular in those days, and the network was loath to cancel its regular programming. Instead, we listened on the radio and then, at least at my house, we watched the telecast, late at night, on tape-delay, and—at least in my house—in glorious black and white. (My father, wary of new technologies and unneeded expenditures, did not pony up for a color TV until the Reagan years.) Now, in 2026, the great event was available in “living” color: the Knicks in their familiar blue and orange, the Lakers in gold and purple, the announcers, Keith Jackson and Bill Russell, sporting the egg-yolk yellow blazers of the ABC network.
