The Knicks finally won a title. I don't know what to do with myself.

The thing I noticed most of all as I walked through the humanity streaming into the streets of Manhattan minutes after the New York Knicks won their first championship in 53 years -- even typing that somehow doesn't feel right -- is this: Fans like myself didn't know what to do.After the screaming, jumping around, hugging a few strangers and trying to capture it all on phones, there was this glassy-eyed confusion. For me, it was a floating feeling that carried me through the streets.

What do you do when you've spent 44 of those 53 years on this Earth rooting for a franchise perpetually stuck in the mud, one that's been on the wrong end of miracles so many times, the one that the marquee free-agent names of the NBA avoided for so many years? What do I do with my hands? How do you tell your brain to process what this means?

I just kept walking.A friend and I had decided to tempt fate and watch the fourth quarter of Game 5 on Saturday at whatever bar we could find that was decently close to Madison Square Garden. With police prepared with metal barriers that would prevent anyone going too far downtown, the mass of fans I joined walked down Sixth Avenue until we were blocks from Macy's on 34th Street.

I called my wife and son and my die-hard Knicks fan dad. I thought about my maternal grandfather who had spent years yelling at the TV when the Knicks played. Then I watched citizens jump on trucks stuck in the chaos and light fireworks and buy $20 unofficial Knicks championship t-shirts from a dude on the corner.

But that feeling of what it meant eluded me.It wasn’t a dream, New York. It really happened.

Your Knicks are NBA champions 🍾🏆 pic.twitter.com/wNSTfaGo5f— ESPN (@espn) June 14, 2026The dichotomy -- is it technically a dichotomy?

I don't know, I didn't get a lot of sleep! -- of being a Knicks fan has always felt a little bizarre to me. I grew up in New York, which is supposed to be the greatest city in the world (it is.

Fight me.) and everything that comes with that