I woke the other day to a text from Collin Loring, a friend and one of my favorite Knicks writers, asking, \u201cHow does the championship still not feel real?\u201d Good question. Here are three theories.<\/p>\n
In August of 1951<\/a>, doctors in and around Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, were confronted with a tsunami of locals becoming violently ill all at once. Their initial symptoms \u2014 nausea, chills, diarrhea \u2014 progressed to convulsions and hallucinations. One man decided he was an airplane, jumped out a second-story window and died. A mother\u2019s 11-year-old son tried to strangle her. Turned out an unscrupulous baker bought some shady flour infested with a fungus whose effects resemble those of LSD.<\/p>\n We know our planet grows increasingly hostile to most of the life it supports (you know why). We know there\u2019s been a steep drop in food regulation the past few years. While you\u2019re reading this, half the country is on the toilet care of corruption and cyclosporiasis<\/a>. Maybe seven weeks ago there was a hallucinogenic fungus in your Cheerios. Or you ate a three-egg omelette and only two of \u2018em were good eggs. Someone might\u2019ve spiked the raw milk and infected us all with Mad Wow disease, deluding ourselves into thinking the Knicks won the title. Moo.<\/p>\n Think about it. The most dominant run of play in THE LITERAL ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE NBA? And the greatest and arguably second-greatest comebacks in playoff history?! And Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns and OG Anunoby morphing into Michael Jordan, Nikola-Joki\u0107-meets-Kevin-Durant and Kawhi Leonard?!? Evel Knievel thinks that\u2019s over the top.<\/p>\n YOU\u2019RE NOT BUILT TO COMPREHEND IT<\/p>\n On Wednesday I woke and opened the curtains to a dusty orange sky. I closed them. Hard to breathe on the orange days. Harder on Thursday, when skies were mostly blue but the air reeked of burning. On Saturday we got our second \u201c100-year storm\u201d in 10 days. Spent eight hours baling water and sewage out of a flooded basement. Thankfully didn\u2019t lose the hot water heater like last time. Lost the furnace then, too. Mighta lost it again.<\/p>\n Climate change, at least for me, now, is all at once grounded and surreal. While the new normal feels increasingly normal, it\u2019s hard to shake the old one. When I was a kid in western New York, we could go a whole summer not hitting 90 degrees and it\u2019d snow anytime from October to May. Now the heat index tops 100 for days and there\u2019s rarely if ever a white Christmas.<\/p>\n The Knicks are champions of the world. Their Finals MVP conducted a closeout game that sits at the same table with the best of Clyde, Magic, Michael and Giannis. They did it while out-dominating the \u201990s Bulls, the Shaq\/Kobe Lakers, the Hamptons Five Warriors and the \u201890s Bulls. Yes, I listed them twice; if you lived through that time you understand why I\u2019ll never get tired of writing it.<\/p>\n I watched it happen! I know that it\u2019s real. Still, I have no frame of reference for such a dramatic shift. What once grounded me no longer exists; what grounds me now is something alien. Linsanity made more sense. Doctor said to take two Wemby fails and see how I feel in the morning.<\/p>\n NOTHING IS REAL AND NOTHING TO GET HUNG ABOUT<\/p>\n The last possibility is surely the darkest, and comes from a story I read once and could never forget, though I have never been able to remember who wrote it or find it since. Read on at your peril.<\/p>\n A man closes his eyes and dies. When he opens them, he is back in his house, with his loved ones. He doesn\u2019t remember dying. Everything inside the house is so familiar, so mundane and perfect, down to the smallest detail, that he simply slips back into everyday life, as it were, as if nothing has changed. That evening, he opens a drawer in search of a key and realizes something is missing from inside the drawer. But he can\u2019t remember what.<\/p>\n The next day, it happens again, this time a book from a shelf. The next it\u2019s a bottle of wine, saved for a special occasion, though he can\u2019t say what it was. Every day, something new disappears, and he can never remember what.<\/p>\n Then one day, one of his children is gone. He suspects it, knows deep inside something is terribly wrong, but he has no memory of them; just the brutal, unspeakable awareness that he can\u2019t properly mourn whomever he\u2019s lost. The next day it\u2019s another child. The next it\u2019s his wife.<\/p>\n The revelation at the end is that the man is in Hell, suffering through this pattern over and over, forever. Maybe Swedenborg wrote the story. Maybe no one did; maybe it\u2019s mine. I can\u2019t remember.<\/p>\n What if Hart missed that bunny, and the Knicks went on to lose Game 4 by one? And then the series? What if we\u2019re is Hell? And we\u2019ve all forgotten that he missed, and reality seems to carry on as normal, only little things keep on disappearing. Mitchell Robinson. Brunson\u2019s healthy left wrist. Maybe Jeremy Sochan<\/a>. Maybe Chris Jent<\/a>.<\/p>\n So, in summation: maybe we\u2019re hallucinating. Maybe the world stopped adding up long before we learned math. Maybe we\u2019re damned. Either way, the Knicks are NBA champions. Whatever this is, don\u2019t wake me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I woke the other day to a text from Collin Loring, a friend and one of my favorite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":780532,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[307844,355,99],"class_list":["post-780531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-knicks-features","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/780532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}