The Knicks Just Staged the Largest Comeback in Finals History. Here Is What It Teaches Us About Grit.

The party I started at on Wednesday night was at a fancy SoHo hotel so discreet it doesn’t have televisions—not in the bar, not in the rooms. By tipoff a TV had begrudgingly been wheeled into the back anyway, because this is New York in June and the Knicks get in everywhere. By the end of the first quarter they trailed the Spurs 41–22. I left to find my friends downtown.

A Knicks Finals run teaches you one thing: the best seat in the city is no seat at all. You watch it outside. It was one of those soft June nights when the whole city leaves its windows open, and cheers from the game reached the sidewalk long before you ever saw a screen. From SoHo to the Lower East Side I caught it in slivers—bar windows, restaurant windows, every screen tuned to the same disaster. (If you are a Knicks fan, of course.) People bent over phones outside bodegas. On Ludlow a guy had brought down his television and propped it in the hatch of a parked Honda CR-V.

My friends had moved from Ten Bells to Scarr’s Pizza–every room turned into a sports bar this evening– where I landed with a slice in hand as the half ended: 76–49, the biggest halftime lead any road team has ever taken in the Finals. In one night I’d gone from caviar to a plain slice and the groans were identical. Nobody in the packed room was leaving.

Then the third quarter happened. The Knicks held San Antonio to 14 points on 4-of-20 shooting. Then the fourth: a miraculous 20–4 run, Brunson hitting a three over Victor Wembanyama’s outstretched arm to cut 29 to one, OG Anunoby—33 points, seven threes, one enormous block on De’Aaron Fox—tipping in Brunson’s miss with 1.2 seconds left. Knicks 107, Spurs 106. We just witnessed the largest comeback in Finals history.

Fireworks were set off on the sidewalks. Orchard Street sounded like the Garden, which sounded, by all accounts, like the inside of a jet engine.

Consider the whiplash. These Knicks came into the week as the clear favorite—riding a historic 13-game playoff win streak, a sweep of Cleveland behind them. Then the streak snapped in Game 3, and two quarters into Game 4 they were, suddenly, the unfathomable underdog. Ever have a great training block—months of clean splits, the fittest you’ve ever been—and then feel something go in your calf during a casual run? It’s like that. Except on the biggest stage in basketball, with the whole city watching through restaurant windows.

You can analyze the comeback all you want. The Spurs went cold. The Knicks’ defense tightened. But Knicks coach Mike Brown knows what really happened. After the game, he shared his halftime message to the team: “You gotta have a little luck in life. You gotta have a little luck in sports. But you can also go make your own luck.”

Alpinists talk this way about weather windows. You can’t summon one, but you can be acclimatized and packed when it opens. Brown’s assignment was almost comically modest—cut the lead to around 15 or 17 by the fourth, and we’ll give ourselves a chance. They made their own luck.

Which is the most useful lesson in sports: you are never out of it. Never mind that the opponent has spent the series throwing you down—literally, in the case of Wembanyama’s uncalled Game 3 shove that sent Brunson to the floor, one the league later admitted should have been a foul. Never mind the whistle imbalance in all of these games. None of it matters until the clock says it matters.

If we’re lucky, we get to touch a little of that in our own sporting lives. The marathon where the wheels come off at mile 19 and somehow reattach at mile 23. The summit push that should have been turned around an hour ago. Middle-of-the-pack athletes like me will never hit a three over a 7’4″ Frenchman. But Brunson—a compact six-foot-two, a second-round pick, a player who wins on footwork and grit—is the closest thing this Finals has to one of us. We know the feeling of being hurt and down and out and then deciding, screw it, let’s keep going.

So whether you are a Knicks fan, a basketball fan, or someone who hasn’t watched a game since the Ewing era, pay attention this Saturday. Fortune in sports is fickle. The great training block doesn’t guarantee the great race, and the blown-up race doesn’t end your story. Watch it wherever a screen finds you: a bar, a sidewalk, the trunk of a CR-V. There is nothing more real—and nothing more useful to carry into your next race, climb, or long, doomed-feeling day outside—than watching someone make their own luck.