Karl-Anthony Towns and Jose Alvarado were on the verge of tears. Josh Hart hadn’t felt so much on-court joy since the 2016 national championship.
One by one, professional multimillionaires uttered the word “crazy,” in love with basketball like never before.
“I don’t think any of us have ever seen anything like that,” Landry Shamet said. “It’s a lot to process.”
Madison Square Garden was dead.
The Knicks trailed 81-52 in the third quarter, en route to one of the most embarrassing and consequential losses in the history of a franchise that has patented pain, about to be two losses from all-time collapse, heading to San Antonio as the underdog again.
Slowly, the tune changed among the sellout crowd, growing louder with every basket made. Each massive eruption dwarfed the previous one, until the Garden somehow reached new heights.
When OG Anunoby’s last-second tip-in completed the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history — clinching a 107-106 win in Game 4 to put the Knicks one win from their first championship since 1973 — the Garden reached unprecedented territory.
This was Willis Reed emerging from the tunnel, colliding with Larry Johnson’s four-point play.
This was Shamet’s bounce joining forces with Patrick Ewing’s putback. From calm to chaos. From embarrassment to elation. The Amish went electric. A funeral morphed into a party.
“I felt for all of y’all who were at the game, obviously, you could feel the abundance of joy at one time from everyone at one time, the collective joy that came out of everybody for that one moment, to hear the buzzer going off and not to see the ball go in the basket, I think we all felt something, like that emotion that was special,” Towns said. “It’s something that MSG hasn’t had that kind of moment in a long time, so shoutout to our fans for real.
“I’ve seen people leave before the game was over at MSG, watching on MSG Network before. … You could see my reaction, the emotion, it kind of spilled out of that moment. It was tears of joy … All you can do is ask for a chance. And for me personally, I just wanted one break in life. And I got one.”
The tickets, which cost thousands, went from a waste to being worth every penny. Permanent hearing loss was a fair trade after more than a half-century of misery, exchanged for a moment to last a lifetime.
“On the bench when we’re slowly walking them down and you feel it shift a little bit and there’s a little bit of hope there that creeps in, it’s hard to explain, but if you were in the building, everybody felt it,” Shamet said. “This isn’t just talking about staying in the game, let’s cut the lead. It was like, ‘No, we’re here, let’s make something happen.’”
