It’s an 8 o’clock tip, so you can probably plan on a full pregame itinerary. You can hit your favorite spot — maybe Stout or Jack Doyle’s, maybe Legends or Tir na Nog, maybe Avenida, the old Lucy’s around the corner on 34th Street. All the places that serve as the warm-up act for Madison Square Garden on Big Game Night.
You will kill those tense, anxious hours before Game 5 — the very definition of Big Game Night — by talking yourself into and out of a Knicks victory a dozen times, because that’s what the season boils down to now. The team has gotten to you. It’s burred a place in your soul even at this relatively early moment in the playoffs. You want more season. You want more basketball. Baseball can wait. Summer can wait.
In one breath, a Knicks fan named Alan Rudolph says, “Cinderella stories are great but usually have the clock strike midnight about 10:30.” And in the next breath he says: “Between our loud crowd and soft rims …”
And you get it. You understand perfectly. In the hours since the Knicks were clubbed 121-89 by the Pacers in Indianapolis on Sunday afternoon, and in all the hours leading up to the start of Game 5 on Tuesday night, you have run the massive sports-fan gauntlet bridging despair and hope, fatalism and confidence, skepticism and sanguineness.
One minute you can dismiss the carnage you witnessed in your television set: “That’s not the Knicks team I’ve watched all year. That’s an outlier,” says Tom O’Malley, a fan from Westchester.
The next you are consumed with dread: “I think they had their chance Friday and we’ll be replaying that shot forever,” Long Island’s Perry Sherman says, referring to the 30-footer the Pacers’ Andrew Nembhart drilled to seal Game 3.
The Knicks have officially reached their Rubicon. It took 93 games, but in the 94th they find themselves with both feet planted in the defining moment of a season. Maybe the Knicks really could win a Game 6 in Indiana. But if that happens, it’s almost certainly got to be with a 3-2 lead in this series. If they make the return trip needing a win to stave off the summer …
Well, that’s kind of where you come into the picture.
This is exactly the reason the Knicks believed it so essential to run through the tape, even midway through Game 82 when they were assured no worse than a 3 seed. They wanted to finish as high as possible, and collect all the perks such a seed yields. Chief among them: playing Game 7 at home. But the truth is: Getting to play Game 5 at home is even more essential. There will be 19,812 folks in the house Tuesday night, same as there’s been for each of the five playoff games that have preceded it.
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In each, the crowd has carried the Knicks through significant portions of the night, the arena’s acoustics lending a hand to the unique hometown stew of ferocity mixed with joy blended with urgency cut by just a dollop of desperation. A lot of home-court advantages are helpful; the Garden’s is embedded in the team’s identity.
We know this doesn’t always translate. If you are old enough you can sing chapter and verse about all the times the folks in the building couldn’t carry the day, specifically in Game 5. If you want to revisit the Bulls in 1993 or the Pacers in ’94 or the Hawks in ’22 — hell, if you just want to think about the 76ers two weeks ago, when the party had already begun in the MSG aisles until Tyese Maxey turned off the music, untapped the kegs and called the cops — you can sure do that.
Or you can focus on what it was like just 369 days ago. That night was another Game 5, and all the Knicks could do was stave off elimination another two days. And at first it didn’t go well, the Heat surging to a 10-point lead after one quarter, threatening to muffle and muzzle the Garden. But the Garden wouldn’t be silenced. The Knicks won that night. It turned out to be just postponing the inevitable, but it was the kind of night, the kind of sound, you remember months later, in the quiet of August, when your basketball jones begins to stir.
That’s what awaits Tuesday night. Some nights, you’re unsure whether you’ll see victory or defeat, whether you’ll savor ecstasy or absorb agony, but you know in advance that no matter what you’ll be saying “excuse me?” a lot in conversations for days to come, until your ears are right again. This is one of those nights.
