At lunch that day, she asked if I thought the Knicks would win Game 7. Sportswriter predictions are seldom worth the paper or pixels with which they are printed, but seldom did we miss an opportunity to make one. I said I was tempted to bet on the mystique of Riley over the forbidding road-team odds. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think maybe they had their chance the other night and they didn’t do it.”
I told her she was being a fatalist—normally my thing—but in retrospect, my gut instinct was based more on wishful thinking. We had already come as far as we possibly could in the playoffs, leaving no bonus time off with the family left in the season to root for. I found myself wanting the Knicks to win, pulling for the story to play out to its most fanciful—or fairy-tale—ending. I had also grown to admire Ewing’s quiet determination and wished for him to get his ring. On top of it all, I wanted Michelle to be rewarded for her commitment, her effort. Was one measly title too much to ask?
Unfortunately, Ewing was outplayed by Olajuwon in Game 7 while Starks set himself up for the Charles Smith treatment by missing sixteen of eighteen shots, in the process sentencing Riley to an eternity of second-guessing for not benching his mercurial guard. In Riley’s defense, Starks had been a money player—arguably the money player—all season. Right to the last misfire, the coach was convinced that Starks was going to make a big one. Never had I ever seen any coach so visibly distraught in the immediate aftermath of defeat—though apparently more for Ewing than for himself. Riley’s voice choked with sadness as he said, “It’s a deep, deep hurt for him right now—there’s not anybody in the room who doesn’t know how much he wants it.”
It was classic Riley—seizing the moment, stretching the drama to melodrama, rendering all of us putty in his soft hands. Of course, in doing what we do, we overdo. That has always been the lore and lure of sports, applying life-and-death consequences to what amounts to a few hours of athletic entertainment. The reality was that nobody had died. Ewing and the Knicks would be back within three months to play on, handsomely compensated in the process. Still, Riley had a knack for making a championship chase feel like the pursuit of world peace. Those Knicks were cloned from the competitive DNA of the man whose working mantra had long been: “There is winning . . . and there is misery.”
Back at the hotel, where Michelle had waited up for me to share a late-night drink and rehash the game, she wasn’t buying the Riley dogma, which he had repeated. “I don’t think he means it literally,” she said. “It’s part of his genius, the sales pitch to his team, the way he gets them to play every night like their lives depend on it.”
Nor did she sound too distressed over losing. Apparently, she wasn’t. “Look at how far they got,” she said. “I can’t be upset. They did their best.” Indeed, most nights that season and throughout the Riley years, the Knicks had “shown up”—another standard Michelle application of acceptable effort from her team. It meant they had, win or lose, played hard, lived up to their end of the bargain. That was all she—or any reasonable fan—could ask.
The next morning, on the plane ride back to Newark, I thought about Michelle’s positivity, her contention that there was, and had to be, an emotional space to stake out between winning and misery. It actually surprised me how quickly she could be so damned reasonable after such a wrenching defeat. In time, I realized it was because Michelle, at heart, was more realist than romantic. Life had already been too challenging, too unpredictable, for her to expect endings scripted by Disney. As long as you tried, really tried, you could rationalize failure as part of the deal. And so I came to better understand what it was Michelle most wanted from the Knicks and, in a larger sense, her commitment to them. More than the Garden’s social benefits, more than any championship parade, her love of the journey was what defined her as a fan. By virtue of showing up, night after night, season after season, she didn’t have to make a scene, or become unhinged in moments of triumph or torment, to prove how much she appreciated the life that she had.
• • • • •
One year later, in May 1995, with Jordan back with the Bulls and a young Shaquille O’Neal dominating opponents in Orlando, speculation mounted that the Knicks’ best chance at a championship had passed and that their partnership with Pat Riley was in serious jeopardy. The insiders knew he was restless and believed to be on the way out as the Knicks fell into a 3–1 hole during a second-round series with Miller and the Pacers. On Wednesday, May 17, 1995, they were trailing by a point with 5.9 seconds remaining in another tense Game 5. On deadline again, I looked around the lower bowl of the arena and began frantically typing:
Fans stood in disbelief, drained and depressed. The Knicks, down
