One Good Thing.

The good guys won. I needed that more than I realized.

I spent the last two minutes of Saturday night’s Knicks–Spurs championship game with my head folded into my palms, as if I were trying to keep my skull from splitting open under the pressure of hope. My fingers formed a narrow cathedral of bone I could barely see through, and I watched the final possessions in desperate, trembling slivers.

Every pass felt like a bullet skimming past my ear. Every whistle felt like the universe breathing directly against my neck. Tears kept slipping through the seams of my hands and dropping into my lap, stubborn and unstoppable, escaping faster than I could wipe them away.

And there I was, perched—again—on the ridiculous little footstool that had accidentally become a shrine. The Knicks started winning while I happened to be sitting there weeks ago, and because sports superstition is both a madness and a religion, I stayed. Knees pressed into my chest, back aching, body bent like a punctuation mark at the end of a long, desperate prayer. Whispering the same plea over and over, because saying it aloud felt like the only way to keep from being consumed by the enormity of wanting.

Can we please have just one good thing…

Just.

One.

Good.

Thing.

I needed the good guys to win because my heart has been a fist for ten years, and on Saturday night, watching my son watch them win, it finally opened.

Of course I wanted the Knicks to win. Of course I wanted Jalen Brunson hoisting that trophy into the lights. Of course I wanted the city I love—loud, bruised, brawling, unkillable—to erupt after fifty-three years of waiting, of squinting at the horizon for a miracle that always seemed to dissolve into mirages. Of course I wanted my son to see his favorite player become Finals MVP and learn that sometimes, unbelievably, the universe lands on the side of grace.

But beneath all of that—beneath the box scores and the superstition and the decades of heartbreak baked into the DNA of New York sports—I was asking for something more ancient, more primal, more bone-deep.

I was asking for proof.

Proof that belief still has weight in the world.

Proof that perseverance still shapes outcomes.

Proof that devotion and discipline still add up to something worthy.

Proof that when people pull in the same direction, they can shift the gravity of a moment.

Proof that the good guys—the truly good guys—can still win.

Because for the last decade, everything has been teaching us the opposite lesson.

Ten years of waking up to fresh indecency, new absurdity, another gouge taken out of our collective sense of what is normal or acceptable or survivable. Ten years of selfishness getting standing ovations, cruelty getting away with calling itself candor, and ignorance strutting around in the costume of authenticity. Ten years of watching a single man—bloated by grievance and appetite and the gravitational pull of his own ego—wash over entire institutions and leave them bleached, brittle, breaking, dying.

Everything Trump touches dies.

Trust dies.

Decency dies.

Community dies.

Shared reality dies.

The simple belief that we owe each other anything beyond transaction and tribe begins to rot under the acid drip of spectacle and manufactured rage.

After enough years of headlines that feel like badly written dystopian parody and moral concussions delivered before breakfast, the damage stops arriving all at once. It settles in.

Sediment by sediment.

Outrage by outrage.

Until one day you find yourself exhausted in places sleep can’t reach.

And then—this team.

This scrappy, stubborn, sweat-shined constellation of human beings who spent the last several weeks reminding us what it looks like when talent chooses humility, when ambition chooses generosity, when individual brilliance chooses to kneel before the altar of something larger than itself.

They trusted each other.

They sacrificed for each other.

They carried each other.

When one man faltered, another stepped forward.

When one man fell, hands appeared instantly, instinctively.

When things looked impossible, they did not curse the gods, the refs, or the rotten odds. They just kept going.

For two hours on a Saturday night, they gave us medicine.

The crying felt like a fever snapping.

It felt like unclenching muscles I’d forgotten I was clenching.

More than anything, it felt like my body had finally reached its limit. My brain decided weeks ago that this team meant something more than basketball. My body caught up on Saturday night. It simply could not tolerate being that close to something good, something decent, something joyful, something so profoundly deserved and still risk losing it. That’s what years of carrying around dread does to a person. Eventually your nervous system stops trusting good news. It starts waiting for the trapdoor. It starts assuming the thing you love will be snatched away at the last possible second because so many things already have been. And when the trapdoor doesn’t open, when the thing you love actually survives, all that pressure has to go somewhere.

In Game 4, the Knicks fell behind by twenty-nine points.

Twenty-nine.

A deficit so deep, so enormous, it felt like a verdict.

And then they dragged themselves back from the dead.

Possession by possession.

Stop by stop.

Inch by inch.

And they won.

Afterward, Brunson was asked whether he doubted himself, and instead of playing superhero, instead of pretending fear never brushed past him, he offered something truer, something I haven’t been able to stop replaying in my mind.

“You’re allowed to think about the worst possible scenario. But you’ve got to go out there and do something about it.”

Then came the championship.

Forty-five points.

Thirty in the second half.

A Finals MVP.

A trophy the franchise hadn’t touched in fifty-three years.

Asked for one word to describe the entire run, Brunson didn’t hesitate.

Believe.

That was it.

Believe.

The smallest word in the English language until someone fills it with enough truth to make it sound like thunder.

Every time I think I’ve pulled myself together, another clip gets me. Brunson hugging his parents. Karl-Anthony Towns talking about his mother. Fans flooding the streets. Strangers embracing like family.

Because this team has spent months modeling something we have been starving for.

Trust.

Loyalty.

Humility.

The willingness to carry each other when it gets hard.

Nobody trying to be the whole story.

Nobody demanding worship.

Nobody turning every accomplishment into an altar to themselves.

Just a group of young men showing up for one another, over and over and over again, until something extraordinary bloomed from the soil of those ordinary acts.

That matters.

Especially now.

Especially against the backdrop of a world bent on teaching the opposite.

Because twenty-four hours later, the contrast couldn’t have been more stark.

On Saturday night, New York celebrated a team. A community. A group of men willing to put something larger than themselves first.

Then came the grotesquerie on the White House lawn.

They said it was about patriotism.

They said it was about America.

Bullshit.

It was about Donald Trump.

The White House lawn looked like somebody fed a monster truck rally, a testosterone supplement commercial, and a washed-up reality show into the same industrial wood chipper.

And that’s exactly why this team hit so many of us so hard.

Because Saturday night was a celebration of everything that spectacle wasn’t.

One was built around ego.

The other was built around effort.

One demanded loyalty.

The other earned it.

One was a shrine to a single man’s endless appetite for attention.

The other was a reminder that extraordinary things happen when people trust each other enough to become part of something bigger than themselves.

They occupied the same country and completely different moral universes.

That’s why the Knicks mattered.

They reminded me of something I’d started losing hold of. They reminded me that some things are still worth believing in. That trust matters. That showing up for one another matters. And that extraordinary things still happen when people refuse to quit on each other. After a decade spent watching cynicism dress itself up as wisdom while cruelty struts around calling itself strength, that reminder felt less like entertainment than absolution.

So here’s to the New York Knicks.

Here’s to Jalen Brunson.

Here’s to Coach Mike Brown.

Here’s to every player who had somebody else’s back when the air got thin, when the court felt tilted, when the whole season seemed to totter and teeter on the edge of collapse. Here’s to the bruises and the loose balls and the late-night film sessions. Here’s to the quiet moments we’ll never see—the locker-room pep talks, the hand on the shoulder, the whispered I got you after a missed shot. Here’s to the invisible labor that makes the visible magic possible.

Here’s to the city, too—this magnificent, unruly, grief-battered, miracle-making metropolis—rising as one organism, one bloodstream, one roaring, rusted-brake symphony of eight million beating hearts. New York, cracked and loud and stubborn as hell, proving once again that hope is a communal sport.

Here’s to the moment on Saturday night when something in the city exhaled.

When the noise burst like a dam.

When strangers embraced on subway platforms.

When car horns became instruments.

When kids climbed lampposts and old men cried into their Knicks hats and everyone—absolutely everyone—felt like part of something larger than their own loneliness.

Here’s to belief.

The kind that survives twenty-nine-point deficits. The kind that survives ten hard years. The kind that refuses to die even when the world keeps giving it reasons to.

Because for the first time in a long time, the universe gave a little something back.

The Knicks lifted a trophy and, somehow, lifted us with it.

And when Brunson held that gleaming, impossible thing high, when the confetti fell like tiny blessings and the arena shook around him, I felt something shift inside me. Small but unmistakable. Like a pilot light sparking back to life after years of cold metal.

Not naïve optimism. Not fairy tales. Something sturdier than that. Something that understands loss and disappointment and still shows up anyway.

Because that’s the truth I keep returning to:

Belief is not magic.

Belief is work.

Belief is choosing to keep going when the world has taught you a thousand reasons to quit. It’s showing up—in the voting booth, in the group chat, in the streets, in the small moments no one applauds. It’s refusing to let cynicism turn you into something smaller than you were meant to be.

It’s Brunson down twenty-nine saying, yeah, I was scared, and going out there anyway. It’s every ordinary person who refuses to surrender their agency in the face of noise, cruelty, and crushing exhaustion. It’s a city remembering what it feels like to roar.

Belief is the sound I made when that final shot dropped—the broken-open, breathless, grateful sob that came from a place inside me where my father still lives, where the child I used to be still curls up with her hopes, where the future version of my son watches the replay and learns something wordless but essential about courage.

So here’s to the Knicks.

Here’s to this team.

Here’s to the miracle of a ball through a net in a country that has felt so bleak for so long.

Here’s to belief—fragile, stubborn—finding its way back to me.

And here’s to the little ember inside all of us that on Saturday night, refused to go out.

Not yet.

Not anymore.

Not with a city behind it.

Not with a team that taught us how to keep going.

Here’s to one good thing.

The kind that reminds you, when you needed it most, that more might still be possible.

But only if you go out there and “do something about it.”

And with that, today’s song:

I love you guys!

Stay safe, stay strong and please, please - stay connected to each other.

💙 Jo

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