How The Knicks Became America’s Team During Their NBA Finals Run

There’s the Italian restaurant just around the corner selling “Knicks Knots,” which are garlic knots with blue and orange food coloring. There’s my daughter’s middle school sending out an email SATURDAY MORNING alerting everyone Wednesday is “Knicks Day” and students should wear their best Knicks garb.

It’d be easy enough to say these examples of the Knicks’ popularity are ample evidence I live on Long Island, right in the heart of Knicks country. Except there’s also SNY broadcaster Steve Gelbs, showing a cup of coffee purchased in San Diego with the words “Go Knicks!” scrawled upon it.

These are anecdotal bits of evidence, adding up to a collective experience for a country that can’t agree on anything except rooting for the Knicks. (Unless you’re in San Antonio, sorry San Antonio).

The crowd at tonight’s Game 3 in New York — the first NBA Finals game at Madison Square Garden since June 25, 1999 — is going to include the nation’s most prominent Republican and one of its fastest-rising Democrats.

No names, because this historic Knicks postseason run — 13 straight wins, which leaves them two wins shy of the franchise’s first championship since 1973 — is about forgetting who the person next to you supports because everyone supports the Knicks, even if they’re an unlikely candidate to unite a fractured country.

Most people outside of New York don’t like New York, because of our justifiable belief that anything that happens here is bigger and more important than anything that happens anywhere else.

New York is especially proud of its basketball heritage. More than 30 Hall of Famers were born within the five boroughs, along with playground legends turned NBA stars such as Kenny Anderson, Stephon Marbury and Rod Strickland.

But these Knicks — playing a joyful, cohesive brand of basketball crafted not on spreadsheets but via hours and hours on the court — are finally an NBA team worthy of the city’s reputation. This might be the closest American equivalent to the Toronto Maple Leafs finally winning the Stanley Cup.

These Knicks are also shockingly human — no small feat playing for a franchise that spent the first two decades of this century as a cold and bumbling corporate monolith.

Josh Hart spent part of his press conference Sunday bemoaning the high ticket prices that make it impossible for the loyal blue-collar fan to attend. Mike Brown, compared so accurately to Joe Torre as the oft-fired lifer who turns out to be the perfect coach to get a veteran group over the top, seems to be having the time of his life, mixing the type of patiently in-depth answers rarely offered by his predecessors with shoutouts to Ben Stiller and Fat Joe.

Nobody embodies the personable nature of the Knicks more than Karl-Anthony Towns, who earned plenty of laughs earlier this spring for his reactions to the Gatorade on the interview podium.

Towns has elicited far different emotions during the Finals. The eloquence with which he speaks of the peace he feels thinking of his late mother during the stressful moments in Games 1 and 2 resonate with anyone whose grieving process includes seeking signs from a deceased loved one.

A shared tunnel vision is a famous trait for these Knicks. But Towns also gets the importance of gazing around once in a while and absorbing what this run has meant to people, whether or not they were Knicks fans when the playoffs began.

“I talked about the word ‘hope,’” Towns said Sunday. “Hope has been brought back to the city. We’ve revitalized that word.”

Inside and outside of New York, at a time when we all need it most.