embraced in the streets<\/a>. Those who might not have been able to name a Knicks player in May shouted themselves hoarse on Saturday as the clock ticked down in Texas. <\/p>\nChants of \u201cGo New York, Go New York, Go!\u201d sounded in thronged beer halls in the East Village and over speakers uptown at Radio City Music Hall, where confetti rained down. Times Square looked like an impossibly warm New Year\u2019s Eve. And the city roared with one voice.<\/p>\n
But the closer one got to Madison Square Garden and the later the hour, the more fraught the night became. And it was here, as on that Sunday morning sidewalk of song, that the hangover set in.<\/p>\n
Meli Rosario, 46, a cashier at a deli on Eighth Avenue just south of the Garden, had awakened early Sunday to horror stories from the overnight shift. People outside wanted to break in, she recalled her boss telling her, and the police barricaded the deli for an hour.<\/p>\n
Blocks away on West 43rd Street and Broadway, near a police substation, gunshots rang out at 2 a.m., sending revelers scrambling away. A 17-year-old boy was shot in the foot, and with the streets too dense for an ambulance to arrive, he was driven to a hospital by the police. He told officers he\u2019d been riding a Citi Bike. Three people were taken into custody.<\/p>\n
People took bats to buses and police cars, shattering windshields and rear windows, the police said. One officer was punched in the face, and another struck with a glass bottle. Four people were stabbed or slashed.<\/p>\n
As 3 a.m. approached, a school bus on West 42nd Street was fully engulfed in flames that licked out the side windows. Four others were burned or broken with bats and people jumping on them, the police said. Videos showed strangers taking turns bashing a school bus with a scooter. People climbed: light poles, scaffolding, halal carts, city buses, parked cars, one another.<\/p>\n
These scenes, mostly playing out near the Garden, were weeks in the making. With every victory in the Knicks\u2019 march to Saturday\u2019s final-seconds victory against the San Antonio Spurs, some fans in the streets near the Garden caused mayhem. At the same time, the police dug in on their countermeasures, night after night.<\/p>\n
As a result, by midday Saturday, the streets outside the Garden looked like T.S.A. checkpoints in a busy airport, with barriers forming single-file lines leading to pens for a ticketed, no-bags-allowed watch party.<\/p>\n
But the final seconds of a close basketball game are terribly exciting, and they take place late at night, and in the end, everyone with a phone in his hand is at his own watch party, no matter where the barricades are.<\/p>\n
After the Knicks win became final, the streets and avenues outside the Garden were flooded shoulder to shoulder. People scaled stalled city buses to stand tall on the roofs. A Spurs jersey \u2014 Victor Wembanyama\u2019s, a new favorite villain for New Yorkers \u2014 was lit ablaze by men on top of a light pole.<\/p>\n
Overnight, 15 people were arrested and another 48 were taken into police custody and issued summonses, the police said. Charges included assaulting a police officer, possession of a firearm, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. That number matched the 15 people taken into custody after Game Four on Wednesday. <\/p>\n
\u201cAs the game progressed and then following the game, the crowds became increasingly destructive, and there were many incidents of incredibly reckless and dangerous behavior,\u201d the police said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The rowdiness was limited to a few hours and a few blocks, and most fans who had come to Midtown were long gone. Cory Hinton, 31, of the Bronx, watched the game at a Dallas BBQ in Times Square, to be out with other people. He did not stick around after.<\/p>\n
\u201cLiterally once the game finished, we were like, \u2018We\u2019ve got to head home because we\u2019ve got to be there for church tomorrow,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
And there he was at 7 a.m. Sunday, at V1 Church in Chelsea, a Christian congregation. Many of the 100 or so in attendance wore the Knicks colors and traded stories about where they\u2019d been the night before.<\/p>\n
Matt Sierra, a pastor and lifelong Knicks fan from East Harlem, smiled as he looked out over the congregation.<\/p>\n
\u201cPraise the Lord,\u201d he said to standing applause. \u201cThe Knicks won!\u201d<\/p>\n
Around the city, while some fans praised a higher being, others just praised Jalen Brunson and his teammates. They smiled knowingly at one another all day Sunday, many still wearing Knicks merch. The troublesome stretch of Eighth Avenue was swept clean by lunchtime. \u201cCleaning up after crowds is what we do!\u201d said a Department of Sanitation spokesman.<\/p>\n
When Ms. Rosario arrived for work \u2014 armed with a can of pepper spray \u2014 she found it quiet. Lots of broken glass for a while, but quiet.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo now we\u2019re just waiting for the parade, and it\u2019s over and we\u2019ll be free again,\u201d Ms. Rosario said.<\/p>\n
Miles G. Cohen contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All those other things \u2014 groceries and gas prices, war and politics and A.I. and the first trillionaire…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3094,4567,67480,222,9,11,1104,10,56,104,9138,88569],"class_list":["post-266807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-arson","tag-basketball","tag-fans-persons","tag-madison-square-garden","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-knicks","tag-new-york-news","tag-ny","tag-police","tag-san-antonio-spurs","tag-times-square-and-42nd-street-manhattan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}