Cancún isn’t the only way to kick off the offseason
The Knick season ended 60 hours ago. Those are the first words I’ve written since.
You can’t know until you start writing about your favorite team that there are light years of distance between your feelings and desires as a fan versus your feelings and desires as a writer. You know how amped you get as a fan before a big game? Like, how you felt between the Celtic and Pacer series? When I watch regular-season games, I’m rarely all that bothered. I have no interest in people who get bent out of shape over them. In every way possible, I zoom out and take in the big picture. In the playoffs the intensity as a fan and a writer ratchet way up.
In the playoffs I will not budge from where I’m sitting, no matter how uncomfortable or inconvenient it may be, if during that time the Knicks have been winning or reduced the deficit from when I first sat. Before the 76ers series last year, I’d been casually pro-Sixers my whole life; now I pray for their crops to be ruined and their fields to be salted. When the Knicks are on a postseason roll I carry their flow with me; if I met you at a bar that night, you’d be making me breakfast the morning with a happy little spring in your step. The Knicks go down double-digits early? I need a Xanax.
The fan in me is at peace after one of the most successful Knick years of my life, knowing their top seven are all under contract next season and a front office that knows what it’s doing probably has plans on how to better build around them. The writer in me is exhausted, and very grateful for the emotional downshift to Mets games in June. They know there are questions we haven’t considered, thoughts we’ve yet to think. I know there’s so, so much I don’t know, but only you, reader, know what that is specifically.
So let’s mailbag. What questions are you left with? Looking back? Looking forward? In the now? Knicks-wise? League-wide? Stuff outside of basketball you figure I’m into? Stuff you figure I’m not? I just wanna gab.