NEW YORK — As the clock headed into the final four minutes of Friday night’s basketball game at Madison Square Garden, the home crowd had gone quiet enough to hear the squeak of the players’ shoes on the court.
New York fans weren’t unhappy, though.
They were just exhausted.
Wiped out from all the cheering, the yelling, the clapping, the dancing, and the celebrating they were doing for the Knicks, who turned this into a romp from the jump, a 119-81 lopsided affair that clinched Game 6 of this second-round playoff series, eliminated the defending champion Celtics, and moved suddenly surging New York into the Eastern Conference finals.
To a place the franchise hasn’t been in 25 years.
By winning a playoff clincher at home, a joy these fans hadn’t experienced in 26 years. Back then, in 1999, the underdog Knicks beat the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference Finals. Come Wednesday, they take on the Pacers again, two underdogs eliminating the conference’s top two seeds (the Pacers took out No. 1 Cleveland) for the right to play for a championship.
Something New York hasn’t won since 1973.
No wonder the fans needed a breather for those few fourth-quarter minutes, revving up as they were to shake Madison Square Garden to its core as the final seconds ticked away. Singing to their loudest volume as the song pulsed through the Garden speakers — “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, good bye” — they rose to their feet, arms waving, throats raw as Knicks benchwarmer Cameron Payne dribbled the ball to the final horn.
And then, as the fans continued their delirium, as the streets surrounding the famed building flooded with celebratory antics, the Knicks starters, the men who had put together their most complete game of the postseason, quietly walked off the court. Led as always by Jalen Brunson (23 points), and with him Karl-Anthony Towns (21 points), Mikal Bridges (22 points), OG Anunoby (23 points) and Josh Hart (with 10 points, 11 assists, 11 rebounds, the Knicks’ first playoff triple-double since Walt “Clyde” Frazier), there was no crazy celebration, no premature antics, no trophy for getting this far.
“Yea, just more to do,” Brunson said. “We’re not done. We came out and played hard, handled business. Our season’s not over. We got so much more to go.”
Their window is wide open now. No Celtics, who destroyed them all regular season. No Cavs, the other team they couldn’t beat all year. It’s the Pacers, with the first two games back on home turf.
“It’s how you respond to the challenge that’s in front of you, we can’t get carried away,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said. “Obviously it’s a great win and we advance, you look at that, but you also understand you have to get ready for the next series. We know Indiana is a terrific team and we have to be ready.”
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Still, after all these years, after beating a franchise with an NBA-best 18 championships, there has to be a moment to celebrate the chance to win your third, no?
“I think the way you have to look at it as whatever your ceiling is, that’s what you’re striving for,” Thibodeau said. “You’re trying to go past whatever the expectations are for you. The goal is always to win a championship. We’ve got eight wins. You need 16. And each one gets harder and harder. You got to keep fighting.”
The Knicks won this one in a knockout.
Unlike Game 5 at TD Garden, when the Knicks weren’t ready for their first prime time moment to close out the series, they threw the first punch, and kept on punching. From an early first-quarter 16-16 tie, the Knicks got hot, the crowd got loud, the defense got going, and the Celtics went ice cold. Having used the last drop in their gas tank to win Wednesday night at home, not even an early-morning visit with their ailing leader Jayson Tatum could provide the fuel they needed.
It was the Knicks who got up off the mat.
“Just the way, that whole Game 5, that just wasn’t us,” Brunson said. “We knew that, we reflected on it, we came back and knew we needed to be better.”
Speaking after the game alongside Towns, Hart and Bridges, the players enjoyed a few laughs, knowing they were barely toddlers when the Knicks last got this far, sharing videos of fans climbing light poles on the New York streets.
“I’m just so excited to be part of it,” Bridges said. “We enjoy it right now, but obviously we have way more to go.”
And they get to start again at home, where Spike Lee anchors a celebrity row that runs the gamut from Timothée Chalamet to Bad Bunny, where noise reverberates enough to make the building shake.
This current Madison Square Garden may neither be located on Madison Avenue nor boast a garden, but as the oldest major sports facility in the New York metropolitan area and the oldest NBA arena in operation, it remains as much a part of the Knicks’ identity as Willis Reed’s limping heroics, Frazier’s outlandish suits or Patrick Ewing’s play in the paint.
They call it the World’s Most Famous Arena. More importantly, right now, they are happier to call it home.
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