I’m proud to be a New Yorker. I haven’t felt this way for a while.
And while I am half a world away in Japan, I can feel the energy and excitement of the city I grew up believing was the greatest in the world.
The source of this energy and excitement is the unity of a community, triggered by the success of a basketball team, the New York Knicks. In the midst of a historic run of 13 straight playoff victories, the Knickerbockers are finally favorites to win an NBA championship.
And that possibility, I believe, has unleashed a renewed love for New York identity.
At the risk of hyperbole, I believe that sport has a power to be a moral equivalent of war – a force that, on occasion, reminds us that the human desire to stand united is and should be more powerful than the ambivalence of falling divided.
New York City is not called the Big Apple for nothing. NYC is big enough to contain at least two professional basketball, baseball, football and hockey teams. But with all due respect to my Brooklyn Nets fans, New York belongs overwhelmingly to the Knicks.
Win or lose, the Knicks have brought the five boroughs closer to the old promise of the melting pot than any politician ever could. That essence was captured in this viral video of a fan who shouted: ”My mayor Muslim! My bagels Jewish! My Christian Dior! Knicks in Four!”
From afar, I used to view the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, as just another smooth-talking politician. But I now see him as a get-it-done pragmatist whose goals align more with working-class New Yorkers across race, borough, religion, and neighborhood than any mayor in recent history.
He’s a Mets fan. He’s a Knicks fan. Which tells you he roots for the underdog.
And when New Yorkers see hard work rewarded, draw energy from the city’s diversity, and treat one another less as strangers than as neighbors, New York City begins to look again like what it has always promised to be: a city of dreams.
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