Exits: Wake up! New York
Julius Randle and a way out from the endless, waking dream of the past.
This one doesn’t have to be so sad. The Knicks lost because the Hawks have had their sights set on the playoffs all season long and the Knicks, plus our own propensity to shirk them from joy, weren’t even sure it could be an option.
What the Knicks did have this season was momentum. You knew it was the real thing and not just New York rolling over Boston, Toronto, Miami, the franchises that slipped, because they were already on their way up before those teams went down, pretty spectacularly, toppling down the east’s stairs while the Knicks barely noticed from the escalator. All season long the Knicks were playing to get there, not past. Now they know how to measure the distance.
My last best memory of New York is just a loud and amorphous swell of sensation. Riding the ferry from the Brooklyn Bridge pier to South Williamsburg, bracing on the top deck in early December so Yusef could point out the buildings he’d designed going up on the shore, my pride lurching in my throat along with the boat. Dodging Santacon Santas screaming down Bleecker Street, staring until my vision washed white at the PS1 Turrell, snow drifting down through the skylight, Dylan and my lips turning blue in the cold room and its soft padding of light and sound. Watching Santas get thrown out of bars, tumble into the streets. Body tired and happy in Yusef and Jill’s old brick kitchen, crowded around their small table with tulips, their faces flushed and warm from the low swinging light hanging overtop, flexing my sore toes against the wide, worn smooth wood planks of their apartment floor like a sated animal. Burning my tongue on midtown slices, burning my tongue on coffee, burning my tongue on every bite at Ugly Baby. Watching Santas pee off the subway platform, the sky clipping quick to night through gaps in the buildings. The mottled bark of tall dogwoods in Boerum Hill, the impossible soft and quiet of the streets just two down from the main. Sitting up in the beautifully designed nosebleeds of Barclays as the Nets wiped the floor with the Raptors, remembering that game when the Raptors went on six months later to win it all. Cramming into a crowded, tiny bar two blocks from the stadium with James and Michael after, all the windows fogged solid.
But then somewhere my last best memories merge with the ones before. Snowball onto other visits so each time the city layers over the last time, almost seamless save for the little details that trip me up like gaps in an uneven sidewalk — a different winter coat, iced coffee over hot, Tyson Chandler still on the Knicks, my friend Shanon in an aggressively orange and blue team toque whereas now she lives in a climate with no use for it, which way I was going over which bridge.
Knicks seasons are like this too. For fans it’s a means of self-protection. How can memories of one year sting worse over another when they all blend into a hardy, steady, learned disappointment? Little swells of hope that live as long as a wave rushing to shore. I can’t, won’t, speak for the players, but cycling in and out of the Garden must have at times felt like enough of something. Like pocketing a small piece of rubble from a crumbling acropolis. Here once stood: something. Their tenures part of that storied, tired history. A history with its halcyon days that, up until now, lived only in the loamy, golden light of the past.
Julius Randle is the perfect hero for New York. Not the hero Knicks fans wanted, maybe. Too much time spent living in memory will make you latch to the first false flash. There is no other explanation for Kristaps Porzingis. Frank Ntilikina and RJ Barrett came next, and while neither was or is as bogus, they also weren’t equipped to handle the full weight of all that hope.
Randle, in his toiling, head-down ethic, his quiet (his final postgame just shy of four minutes, mostly made up of the questions he was asked over the length of his answers) and abiding approach, did not come blazing into the Garden like an already crashing Icarus, he only walked, slowly, out onto the court from the locker room every game except three for two seasons. On court he is deliberate, methodical, drawing the eye the way a train passing in the distance will, one that’s been there for five or ten minutes already, miles long with freight, the deception of force stretching and blurring into scenery. Steady, steady.
He seems immune to narrative, the proximity to James Dolan’s vanity and counting one of the most stubbornly sustained and recurrent character rewrites as a teammate in Derrick Rose easily deflected. He’s shown he can handle the roaring expectation — playing all season in front of an empty arena then suddenly packed full, wild and keening — but more than that he can take the burden of faith. In this postseason and it’s disappointment, he’s eased a franchise and a fanbase so desperate for a saviour, a direct and sudden road to deliverance, toward the understanding that this will take time. More time.
The most revealing part of Randle’s clipped postgame was when he was asked whether he was anxious at all to get back to work over the summer. Bending forward toward the mic he says softly, “Very anxious,” he blinks and briefly squeezes his eyes shut, “very anxious to get back to the grind.”
Time, to Randle, is the balm. Something he can fold himself into. Where so many players find themselves running up against a ceiling, self-imposed or real, in their 5th to 7th seasons, frustrated at what hasn’t come yet, Randle wants the work.
For so long the concept of time for a team like New York only went backward. Went as far back to where people’s memories start to reliably blur and the truth of what happened stretches, turns fluid. The last best thing to remember. Though time is the last thing any Knicks fan would ask for, Randle and this team have delivered, finally, a way to move forward. An exit from the endless, waking dream of the past.