It was sweaty and a little disgusting. It was basically rude. When Knicks fans cheered a 2021 win over the Celtics, it was New York bravado in an \u201cI\u2019m-walking-here\u201d kind of way.<\/p>\n
\u201cBING BONG,\u201d one fan screamed into the microphone. Another pressed his finger to his forehead forming the L shape for loser. Fans cursed out Boston, Tom Brady and Kevin Durant. One fan, jumping up and down, bleated breathlessly: \u201cTell me a little something K.D., don\u2019t you regret not coming to the Kniiiiiiiicks? Don\u2019t you regret not coming to the Kniiiiiiiicks?\u201d<\/p>\n
Those 56 seconds, captured in a Knicks fan video<\/a> from the street show Sidetalk, were partly the inspiration for Zohran Mamdani\u2019s video strategy as he ran for mayor.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want your campaign to feel like this,\u201d a video producer, Anthony DiMieri, recalled telling Mr. Mamdani when they met in fall 2024 to begin crafting his social media approach.<\/p>\n From the start of his successful campaign, Mr. Mamdani was adamant about the version of New York City he was selling. This wasn\u2019t the New York of private social clubs (sorry Zero Bond) or hard-to-get restaurant reservations. It was the version of New York City that draws in broke 20-somethings heady on a combination of overconfidence and resolve.<\/p>\n So Mr. Mamdani campaigned by singing Jay-Z at a club in Bushwick in Brooklyn, jumping into the frigid waters at Rockaway Beach in Queens, walking under the steel and limestone colossus of the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn and digging into Halal cart food with a plastic fork. His campaign superimposed \u201cZohran\u201d over a Knicks logo in an ad \u2014 a miscue that resulted in a cease-and-desist letter<\/a> from the Knicks.<\/p>\n Six months into his mayoralty, the stars aligned not just for the Knicks but for their mayor. The N.B.A. championship briefly made real Mr. Mamdani\u2019s throbbing, enchanting vision of New York, all in one good-old-days-are-now moment.<\/p>\n Tens of thousands of people poured onto the streets in mass blobs of blue and orange, lights flashing and voices belting and grown men sobbing, together forming a scene that looked like a Frank Sinatra-scored television ad for New York.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a New York City that so many locals know. It\u2019s lugging an air-conditioning unit up the steps of a walk-up in sticky heat. It\u2019s locking eyes with a rat going to town on the crust of an abandoned slice of pizza. It\u2019s passing a window twinkling with the lights of someone else\u2019s party, learning intimate details about the life of a couple next door that fights at full volume.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the New York of last Saturday night: people swinging from traffic lights, strangers giving bear hugs, masses forming a party that stretched across boroughs and didn\u2019t cost a dime to attend.<\/p>\n For an instant \u2014 preserved on tens of thousands of cameras, plastered on social media and now being edited into future footage for the mayor by his video team \u2014 New York City looked like the version of itself that Mr. Mamdani\u2019s campaign sold. Sometimes sports heroes can do what politicians and pastors cannot \u2014 give people evidence that belief can be rewarded.<\/p>\n Some of Mr. Mamdani\u2019s supporters were quick to lay claim to the celebrations, as if the mayor himself was on the court. \u201cThis is your city on socialism,\u201d the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America wrote on X<\/a>, reposting the N.B.A.\u2019s championship announcement.<\/p>\n \u201cWelcome to Mamdanistan,\u201d wrote<\/a> City Councilwoman Shahana Hanif.<\/p>\n