How The Knicks Saved New York City

The championship nobody saw coming and the city that needed it most

When I moved to New York almost a decade ago, I was honestly a little disappointed by it as a sports city. I grew up in Boston, where sports are the weather. People talk about the Red Sox in line at the grocery store. They talk about the Patriots at work. A bad loss can ruin the mood of an entire town. I’d spent my whole life hearing that New York and Boston were rivals, that they cared about sports with the same intensity.

But when I got here, that wasn’t what I found at all.

Part of that is because New York is simply too big to revolve around sports. On any given night, there are Broadway shows, concerts, museums, restaurants, comedy clubs, bars, and a thousand different neighborhoods all pulling people in different directions. There are two baseball teams, two football teams, two basketball teams. Unlike Boston, where sports often feel like the center of civic life, in New York they’re just one option among many. To be fair, it’s a credit to how vibrant cultural life in New York can be at its best.

But over the last few weeks, something happened that completely changed my understanding of New York. As the Knicks went on an improbable championship run, I walked out onto the streets and saw something I’d never seen before. Strangers were talking to each other. People were hanging out of car windows. Entire blocks felt connected by a shared experience. For the first time in ten years, New York felt less like a collection of neighborhoods in one of the world’s biggest cities, and more like a small town.

And that’s what made me realize I had misunderstood the Knicks all along. This wasn’t just a story about basketball. It was a story about one of the last institutions capable of making eight million people feel like they’re part of the same community. The story of how the Knicks won a championship is really the story of how a city that rarely agrees on anything finally found something that brought it together.

What I’m Enjoying Right Now

u + me = <3, by Olivia Rodrigo

One of the things I love most about u+me=<3 is how specific it is. Olivia Rodrigo writes about the tiny, almost embarrassing details that consume your brain when you’re falling for someone—the random interactions, the fleeting moments, the little things that suddenly feel impossibly significant. The song understands that falling in love rarely feels like a grand cinematic moment. More often, it feels like obsessing over a handful of details that nobody else would notice, slowly convincing yourself that they mean something. The specificity is what makes it feel real.

What makes the song resonate is that it captures the optimism of at the beginning of a relationship before reality has a chance to complicate it. It’s about that brief period when it feels like you’re learning something new about a special person every day. There’s no cynicism, no self-protection, just the vulnerability of letting yourself imagine what could happen next. The details belong to Olivia, but the feeling underneath them is universal: the excitement of realizing that your world has become a little brighter because one person is in it.

Usually, I like having one more item in the newsletter, but the Knicks forced my hand this weekend and had me working overtime!

Thanks for reading.

Joon