Like so many New Yorkers, Kevin and Kayvon, 38 and 29, had been hanging on every moment of the playoffs in a state of suspended disbelief. Sitting at home, Kevin said, “I was making sure every night I was locked in, speakers dialed up. It had to sound like MSG in here.” Kayvon was putting in overtime at his night job at a group home for adults with intellectual disabilities—he brought his own television and Amazon Fire TV Stick to the office. “Sometimes my clients watch the game with me,” he said. “Sometimes they know, once it’s game time, Okay, we’re gonna leave the staff alone for right now. I get them little snacks or something.”
The victory is a weight off the shoulders of New Yorkers who never thought they would live to see the day. “It was a lot of jokes,” Kayvon said. “A lot of being quiet in certain moments when they talking about championships. It was a lot of bad moments, but you know how New York fans are. We’re loyal no matter what.” As anyone who stepped outside on Saturday night could attest, the relief was palpable in the streets. After the Hills left the watch party, they spent the next several hours roaming midtown Manhattan, celebrating with strangers at a nearby bar, and waving a Knicks towel at a honking mass of cars.
“The next thing you know,” Kevin said, “it’s six o’clock in the morning.”
The image of Kevin’s and Kayvon’s faces on VF’s cover is familiar to revelers across the city who turned their street corners into watch parties and their building façades into projector screens. They seemed possessed, Califano told me, by the same forces affecting almost everyone he photographed that night as he and I bounced around Manhattan: “a sense of camaraderie and collective euphoria that I have only witnessed maybe once or twice before in my life.”
Photographer Jack Califano
“I got the sense,” he continued, “that they, like a lot of longtime Knicks fans in the city, felt that their belief in the Knicks was a kind of spiritual obligation—that if they fell short in supporting the team in this exact moment, they risked the entire city’s hopes and dreams. They were screaming and cheering like it mattered on a metaphysical level. It was easy to capture.”
By the end of our call, the Hills were riffing back and forth. “New York is like the steel city, the gritty city—that’s everything they say about New York,” Kevin said. But on this occasion, “New York, it was a very friendly New York, a very Knick-friendly New York.”