We are so back.

A few hours above the city with the Knicks in five.

I keep trying to name what got lifted that night the Knicks won, and the thing is, I’ve been thinking about it wrong, because it wasn’t something that got lifted so much as something that got put down, a whole set of instructions we’d been carrying so long we’d stopped calling them instructions and started calling them just, you know, how things are. A public is, among other things, a set of beliefs about other people, and ours had curdled.

The pandemic taught us another person's breath could end you, which is a thing you cannot really learn and then unlearn. Biden's lesson was almost soothing in how it absolved us, suggesting that governance happened elsewhere, among adults, and we could return to our lives as its audience. Trump’s was the one men have always felt they’ve needed to believe. That the world is dog eat dog, that the tender parts of you are just the parts that haven’t been bitten yet. And then Eric Adams taught us to get on the subway and immediately figure out who was going to be the problem.

What I want to say is that we had been clenched since 2020, all of us, more or less — the jaw, the shoulders, the whole accumulated brace of it — and then the Knicks won and whatever had been held there let go, rose a few feet above the city, hovered, as if deciding whether to come back. (It hasn’t yet.)

Maybe it started a week earlier. Down 29, nine minutes left, a man named OG Anunoby — who is not known for his expressiveness, who conducts himself on a basketball court with the affect of someone doing a task he finds moderately interesting — went up for a ball that was already a foot above his head and tipped it in, and something cracked open in the city that hadn't been open in a while.

And then there were just people, which is rarer than it sounds. Dancing, embracing strangers, being a public in the almost-forgotten sense, the sense that requires you to look at all of it — the mess, the proximity, the noise, the total absurdity of that many humans pressed together choosing the stupid silliness of joy — and not flinch.

For five years after the pandemic there was a whole genre of essay asking whether New York was over, whether the public was finished. And then the Knicks won and people shouted at screens and into the night sky and at strangers they would never see again, and the answer came back so exquisitely simple. Fuck no, we are so back.