"The Knicks Are My Life"

We Found Love in a Hopeless Place

Jul 01, 2026

Still working on a much larger piece that I really want to get right because it’s a little stoney, and I promise it is on the way, but the NEW YORK FUCKING KNICKERBOCKERS NBA CHAMPIONSHIP compelled me to express the whirling cloud of emotions that ran through me on those drunken euphoric late nights pounding the pavement with crowds of friends and strangers alike. I can’t believe what I witnessed with my own eyes. Even now a couple weeks removed, the afterglow still remains, and really that’s what this write-up is all about. To be able to see this happen, to experience this in real time, has without exaggeration changed me psychologically. Mamdani’s New York off to a rocking start, maybe we can take this energy and point it in the right direction, keep it going.

Thanks for bearing with me on the delays writing more, it has been quite a hectic last few weeks to say the least. A move, an influx of orders that I am infinitely grateful for, a near-religious dedication to watching one of if not the craziest playoff runs I’ve ever seen, all while collecting every note, passing thought, connection, and bit of research in my notes app for the next piece. I promise I’m not procrastinating. Also, insanely grateful to see we’re apparently still climbing the Rising charts in Fashion & Beauty on here, which frankly surprised me considering I never can truly tell if people are actually still checking in. I’m still trying though, with writing, with my personal work, with trying to improve, as hard as I can, as much as I can, that I promise. As usual, thank you so much for the support, for the orders, for sharing and liking, and of course, for reading.

-ms

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The last few weeks of my life were dedicated to frantically packing up all my belongings and preparing for a move that couldn’t have come any faster. You may remember my last apartment from a previous piece on the cruel brutality of the greater American cultural moment. In that spot, I was without heat or hot water for a week straight in the heart of the coldest stretch of unforgiving winter, combatted pests of all types, had very little natural light, and had to fix damn near every appliance and amenity possible myself. A living situation so detrimental to my mental wellbeing that it seemed to be the only proper place to experience the flat, grey, disgusting state of things at the time. What a mess.

Nevertheless, I moved, finally after now 7 years at various points, away from the throbbing Yup vein of the L/M/J train lines. It should’ve been sooner in hindsight, but maybe I was too stuck in my ways, too convinced that I was actually a part of that realm, or rather that I even wanted to be. What was once still somewhat tolerable during the uncertain tail end of Trump 1 and the meandering, complacent Biden years has ripped its mask off and revealed its transformed contemporary visage in the Trump 2 era. A cultural nastiness present that may have just been sitting dormant this whole time below the surface, waiting to have just enough cultural space to emerge unchecked like some Yuppie Eldritch Horror. To be met daily with hypermodern grotesqueries, hollow anonymous expressions, screen-dulled lightless eyes that only seem to look past or through you, shameless douche-isms, sweaty sycophantic clout drunk belligerence and social capital hunger, sentient bowl restaurant E-Citibike banal passive-hostility, no doubt warps how one sees the world of the present. In short, geographically, mentally, emotionally, and socially, I was simply in the wrong place for the past few years. That previous era also inspired this piece about those very same mutations I saw occurring in the city, with leisure and culture and all the rest getting gradually relegated, co-opted, or otherwise snuffed out over time, transforming it into some homogenized memetic Instagram backdrop, a playground for aspiring tech bros or influencers or any other type of prospective social conqueror armed to the teeth with social media and grand delusions of billionaire moodboard posts.

Simultaneously, and I know some of you out there can relate (thanks as usual for all the responses to IG story rants and raves), I was finding myself out of sync with the contemporary world. Maybe due to those factors above, maybe some type of stunted maturation, maybe because the things I was once interested in that would have kept me up with the times had become bastardized and pimped-out nearly beyond recognition of what they once were to me. Regardless, I kept experiencing the sensation of not being a 2026 person. The new updates and constant deluge of Media and Content and commodities and synthetic hype and useless discourse and so on and so on just didn’t grab me and pull me in like they used to, like I knew they should. I just couldn’t bring myself to give a fuck anymore. My attitudes, my ways of going about things, what I want out of life, my refusal to mutate into a clout fetish exhibitionist or snake oil schmoozer or Human Brand, simply felt out of place in the current year, and I was really struggling to stay tethered to it. No matter how hard I tried, it just felt like I didn’t fit in. Like Billy Pilgrim, I felt I had become unstuck in time. By design, the slow drip feed of social media creates time without time, one long cultural homogenized blob. The duty of differentiating everything, for establishing befores and afters, is shunted to us, the consumer, and we don’t really do a good job of it of our own volition. More often than not, we simply let it all bleed together. It’s no wonder why it feels like such an existential shock when you think about the decade being more than halfway over at this point, what is there to show for it? When the zeitgeist at large is something that you don’t want to participate in, or headed in a direction you don’t want to go, or simply not enticing to you, you sometimes simply just slip out of it with no clear alternative present. Materializing into some temporal liminal space removed from the stream of Love Island arguments and cyclical mass produced product debates and taste signaling and useless buzzword discourse and publications making their 125th list of the year and post-4chan chudspeak. It can get really lonely there. It can feel like you’re not of the present anymore.

Although this is primarily an online phenomenon, it certainly applies IRL as well. The flattening of all references, signifiers, and other cultural ephemera digitally now works efficiently in tandem with macro homogenization and dilution physically. Yes, there may be slight variations in the jokes and niche memes and buzzword soups and outfits, but the outcome, the feeling, remains the same. A culture of narcissism in the sense that it is constantly looking at itself, primping, pruning, sanding its rough edges or dissolving its loose ends like manic plastic surgery treatments. Practically speaking, outside of various senses of superiority or what Instagram accounts they follow, there is not much difference now between the collection of symbols of the West Village Basic Girlie vs the Ridgewood Crunchy Leftist vs the LES Clout Demon vs all the rest. Not in the sense that they don’t look different, or have (allegedly) different tastes, but rather the method in which those tastes are expressed. Passed through the great digital flattener and digested in the exact same cyclical way, carefully refined and auto-cannibalized through insular and incestuous meme pages and outfit screenshots and cynicism and on and on. This is because regardless of neighborhood, city, or state, we have all made our digital space our primary home. The physical world takes a backseat, or merely becomes a means to an end to further furnish our meticulously crafted and curated online persona. The eyes and ears and thoughts of the phone steal from the ones of the body. When that symbiotic digital-physical cycle loses its allure, you may find yourself wondering what there even is outside of it. New anxieties and fears emerge when you find yourself disconnected like this. Am I doing enough? Am I making the most of my time in the city? On Earth? In Life? Should I be doing more? What more even is there? How can I find it? Will I even like it once I do? Who else is with me?

This was the tumultuous headspace that followed me into the middle of April, where I emerged from my apartment for the first time in what felt like centuries to meet up with some friends for a watch party for the New York Knicks taking on the Atlanta Hawks for the first round of the playoffs. My entire tenure of Knicks basketball had set up a sort of resigned caution when it came to watching their postseason runs, having experienced far more than a fair share of heartbreaks and disappointments and almosts over the years, while the last 2 seasons in particular ended with such nail-biting heartache that it felt like that was all we were destined to repeat, ad infinitum. What seemed to be the norm, as in life, was that concrete dense thought that sits in the back of most people’s minds these days, that things will usually end just before the zenith. Just have to enjoy something while it lasts and try and have a good time in the process, because things always shake out to the expected. The proverbial boot will always find its way to drop. Maybe next time. The vibe watching this game, with the Knicks already down in the series 2-1, reflected that as well. Dampened moods, still in heavy jackets trying to shake off the last lingering remnants of the long Forever Winter, vitamin D and expectations critically low, sharp conversations about a city that at the time felt abnormally particularly barren, infested with creative director creatures and tiny mic terrorists and line waiting losers, New York really needs some type of catalyst for positive change otherwise- oh hey, the Knicks won the game! All right!

Turns out, as you already know, this would be the start of one of the most astounding playoff runs in league history. The wins just kept coming in all forms, and as they stacked up, with each new unexpected addition to the tally, a gradual psychological shift occurred. In me, and in the city. Through the end of the Atlanta series, through Philly, through Cleveland, we were now in uncharted waters. I didn’t know what to think frankly. Simultaneously, I had just found and signed the lease on a new apartment I absolutely loved, an escape parachute from the metaphorical and physical pit I had found myself in for the previous 28 months, a change of scenery and new era just around the corner. Things, for the first time in a ludicrously long time, were actually looking up? Nah, couldn’t be. There, latent in my mind like many a Knick fan, sat a sort of fixed PTSD response, a near-Catholic level of guilt and temperance. Do not ever get excited, don’t get greedy with happiness, keep calm so as not to jinx anything or reverse a streak of good fortune, just be grateful it’s happening right now. When things go bad, as they usually do, it will be your fault for fucking it up cosmically. Memories still preserved in my mind of Melo getting blocked by Roy Hibbert, of opportunities that fell though and vanished, of crushed hopes from the unforgivable sin of letting your expectations of what’s possible get too far ahead of you. Things always revert back to the usual. The other side of that door, with its euphoria and room for celebration, just isn’t reached. Those things just don’t happen to you.

In the city, in the early spring prior to this playoff run, things felt around the same for everyone still with a soul, shaking out to a low baseline. The seemingly ceaseless grey suffocating dreariness of a brutal winter polluted its way into the attitudes and vibes of the area as a whole. Horrifying news of some new “Fucking Kill Everyone For No Reason” legislature or regressive cultural shift greeted us daily like the reliable icy winds that ripped through gloves and jackets. Despite all common knowledge of the contrary, it sincerely felt like there was a strong possibility things would just remain like this forever. Trapped in some Greek mythical punishment, doomed to live out the same frigid, bleak, slate day perpetually until the end of time. Combined with the citywide, really nationwide, trend of a social media dictated culture, there was an overwhelming feeling of distance and separation on a person to person level. Airpod-clad, glaring or blue-light-blank-faced strangers, through phone call or text conversation or social media doomscroll, always potentially somewhere else, entirely removed from where they are physically. Interactions were intrusions, interrupting this mental projection elsewhere was primarily met with skepticism, distrust, or flat out hostility. Tensions high as the idea of the Other seemed to disappear completely, or rather mutate, into a foreign entity to be defended against and exiled at all times.

It is no surprise why this attitude at large of anti-Other is so staunchly reinforced in our contemporary world, because it is more than anything else the primary thing being emphasized, reinforced, and encouraged in nearly all aspects of the current culture of the country. From propagandized demonization of immigrants, different social or racial groups, or frankly anyone that’s not You (the Main Character btw), to the calcifying mental walls constructed in our atomized, narcissistic, isolated population. Those in high positions of power, through constant hoarding, cheating, scamming, and stealing for the select few on their “In team”, don’t just emphasize this cultural moment, they set the template that has certainly and very clearly leeched its way into the population, from the email-job petit bourgeoisie to the gig economist citizen, and all the rest. As defined by the country right now, being a stranger, an Other on the outside, is just about the most inexcusable offense one can commit. The main goal, constantly reinforced, is being In. Becoming a Have instead of a Have Not. More so, being seen as such. It’s not enough to simply experience the benefits of being behind the proverbial velvet rope, it needs to be stamped and validated for the world to see as proof. In a time of great uncertainty about the future, the top priority is climbing that ladder to the top, being on the winning team, with the belief that there are only but so many spots available. You better make sure that’s You. Being on the inside brings (alleged) safety, security, assurance, reliability, things that are critically lacking in the cold, harsh outside. We can see this manifesting in the confrontational nature of daily interactions, the standoffish glares of strangers, the unspoken asking of “who the fuck are You?”

It’s a no trust world. Can’t trust people to look where they’re going, can’t trust cars to stop for stop signs, can’t trust the news or the weather app or the quality of your groceries, can’t trust people to do their jobs or respond in a timely manner or live up to their word or be competent or do the right thing or not use you or not act entirely selfishly. Can’t trust anything. It’s a vicious, self-propelling cycle. Low trust builds more low trust, and it spreads to an underlying latency for the whole country. Me is all that matters when there’s no faith in Them. It can also be seen as a large shared symptom of the crisis of shrinking third spaces, with the amount of places to naturally expand your circle vanishing or being replaced by guest listed, ticketed, accounted for commodified events. “Who do you know here?” On a more innocuous side note, I’d argue that this latent attitude of craving belonging to something special or exclusive manifests as things like the rise in “___ Club” graphics on clothing, or the mass micro-subcategorizations present in so many hobbies and interests. Paradoxically wanting desperately to belong to something, but also wanting it to be forever more exclusive. The primary goal of the average Social Media-American in 2026 seems to be hacking away at and shrinking the middle of the Venn diagram as much as possible. Again, in our current state of ruthless neo-fasc-capitalism, and its perverted “bootstraps” mentality, this all is floated as simply optimization in order to better get ahead. In hard or thin economic times, when commonality is removed as a priority, you start to care less about other people’s struggles, their perspectives, their existence, by design. Empathy for the Other becomes a liability.

During the past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about the golden years of San Francisco during the hippie movement, now tarnished and transformed by the cold claw of tech bro feudalism. The fun, the soul, the common spirit and inertia that melted together into something without shape, sucked away and replaced with rigid walls, commodified and dissolved. Repackaged for ad campaigns. I’ve been thinking about the halcyon days of New York hipsterism, reminiscent of the beatniks and New Wave-ers of yesteryear if only through fleeting moments and feelings. The same fate awaited them, beaten into cringe obscurity or gone professional, sold out indefinitely. The inevitable commercialization, corporatization, and commodification of any organic shared moment comes as no surprise now, especially in modern America, but it still leaves some, myself included, with a lingering naive hope, glimmering dreams of artistic and intellectual and social fulfillment, and the stinging reminder that these things at one point could afford to exist. Left wondering how we could possibly get back (or maybe go forward) to it again. Are these unspoken shared moments and movements simply doomed to exist in the amber of memories and folk tales? Trapped in hypotheticals and “we should do this” group chat messages? They say to fish where the fish are, but what happens when the ponds and lakes shrink by the day because of forces outside of our control? Humanity may certainly still be found between those in those small private rooms on the inside, but is shouldn’t be limited to just there. The people have to be out there somewhere, right?

The day of the first game of the NBA Finals, I picked up my keys and entered my new apartment for the first time. A wave of relief washed over me as I inspected the flat floors without jagged boards, the functioning appliances, and the breathing room available to me here. In the midst of the Knicks’ unprecedented win streak, it felt like their and my joy were somehow linked. I didn’t think I’d ever feel like this again. That measured PTSD, that draining, frantic anxiety, still sat to keep needling me with dull pain like an old scar not fully healed. This won’t last, don’t get ahead of yourself, the boot will drop soon. I did my best to ignore it and just live in the moment. If that sinister, looming disappointment was coming, I might as well enjoy the time spent without it while I can. After arriving to the spot where we’d be watching the next few games, a closed down former nightclub, BYOB and word of mouth only, filled with around 40-50 people, I was thinking about what privacy and intimacy even meant in 2026. Here I was, via friends, in a space untarnished by the noxious creep of social media fliers, of IG story “pull upppp”s, of blown out line waiting or panoptic RSVP websites. It felt like the future of what I was looking for in New York, a healthy combination of private and public that is still being perfected. There was no superficial incentive for someone to show up to this space besides simply being a Knicks fan, wanting to have a good time, and having at least one mutual friend in common. It was all organic, and the good vibes of the Knicks snatching the first two games in San Antonio matched that. The air in the room was filled with vibrating, communal rejoice. Hugs in disbelief we made it so far, a dreamlike intoxication, a recognition that we’re all on the same team.

What makes things tantalizing or desirable or alluring, especially in New York, especially in sports, is closeness. An accessible proximity that inspires motivation and more importantly effort and contribution to reach it. Be that getting informed, getting active, getting involved, and so on. This Knicks run, being so temporally based, re-inspired the FOMO I had been desperately looking to recover after feeling like I’d never experience it again, the way leisure had been commodified and homogenized the past few years. There are only but so many games to watch, and you want to, have to be there to experience them in real time, surrounded by Others. The way things have been set up in our modern day and current cultural moment revolves nearly entirely around distance. Separation, barriers, walls, chasms between the Haves and the Have Nots, the Ins and the Outs. From hulking gentrified VC funded influencer spas to monthly fee social clubs to the clout ladder Olympics. Establishing yourself as separated from the general public, the social proles, as being special, takes top priority. This is no doubt due in large part to the all seeing eye of social media aggregation, the incentive to publicly flex status or knowledge or turning being “in the know” into quick flashes of content. It’s not about enjoying or experiencing the moment in real time with your own eyes and ears, but rather showing off that you did through the ones of the phone camera. Ticking off a box, turning life into a series of badges to decorate your profile with. This same phenomenon is directly and primarily responsible for how quickly spots for leisure become burnt out, or plagued with long wait times, or have their clientele tainted. There is simply too much incentive to prove you were in somewhere, and more importantly, that Others weren’t. This Knicks run inverted that completely. Instead of prioritizing distance and separation from the Other, it was all about that one gigantic shared middle ground, that collective, communal overlap, with the elation and great vibes being a direct product of that. Now where have I heard that before?

In a culture of normalized, encouraged, and reinforced social narcissism and individualism, one that revolves solely around repurposing lived experiences almost as designer clothes to publicly flex, a rejection of that is seen as abnormal. Living in the moment is inherently disrespectful to the all-encompassing vice grip of the phone, breaking through that phenomenon of “being somewhere else” that has become so common, and firmly planting yourself into the here and now. Moments, when truly lived through without a buffer or screen, wind up feeling all the more real. Returning to that feeling I was talking about earlier, of not feeling like a “2026 person”, there has sincerely been no better way to have myself feel truly grounded in the present than the Knicks Finals run and win. It was a perfect example of something that breaks that impulse to be somewhere else that feels so natural in the phone era. Both physically, through shared space and communal emotion, and temporally, with a set schedule and a ticking clock, the last few weeks have made me feel more in tune with the Now than I have in years, without exaggeration. I’m here, living through every second.

As Mike Breen eloquently and succinctly put it in the final seconds of game 5:

“Knicks fans, this is not a dream!”

When the Knicks took the final game, finally reaching the apex of the long climb, as the buzzer sounded and electricity surged through the air of the Chinese restaurant we were at, arms wrapping shoulders and eyes welling up, there was a moment where time stopped. Almost like the stillness before sound catches up to the light of an explosion. I took those precious milliseconds to look around at the faces and expressions of my fellow fans, the longtime sufferers, the tried and true believers, those that just kept going through all the bullshit with mended hearts. We fucking did it. The present, the here and now. As elation ripped through the room, and hugs and daps and back slaps and all the rest crescendoed and flooded out into the streets where they’d reside for the next 5 straight hours, I still had my hands on my head in disbelief. A sentiment I heard expressed all throughout the night was one I involuntarily said in those early moments of celebration, “I never thought I’d see this happen.” and that was the truth. There were times I’d wonder if I’d even be alive to see a day like this come to fruition. It was almost impossible to comprehend that we had just been snapped into a new world. Perhaps the most powerful quote I heard that night was one shouted almost without an origin within the first few minutes following the game that rung out over all the noise and struck me dead center in the chest. “I’m not a loser!”

For a lot of us who have watched the Knicks for a significant enough amount of time, much like life, we had been accustomed to not so much disappointment as an understanding that these things just don’t happen to you. All throughout life, you see and hear the stories of success, of miracles, of people who win big, whose lives change forever, of winners. But of course, that simply doesn’t happen to you. You don’t get the dream job, you don’t win the lottery, your crush doesn’t like you back, the fantastic always finds a way to swerve and miss you, that’s life. In some cosmic dice roll, you become used to never reaching the other side of serendipity. Expectations are tempered, everything levels out to the expected, the usual. Nothing ever happens. But then, something does happen. An otherworldly, powerful reminder that you haven’t seen everything yet. Life still has some new tricks up its sleeve. Your team finally reaches the zenith, you get that email that starts with “We are happy to…” instead of “Unfortunately…”, the right candidate actually wins the election, the coolest pop musician of the 21st century wants to buy your hat, there are sometimes these moments, these unexpected mind-blowing reminders, that these things can still happen. That it’s not over yet. It sort of stuns you, there is a clear before and after effect. Life will continue onward as usual, but now with crucial additions we take with us. Memories we tuck into our wallets to patina with time, to glance at when things get low and reassure us of what we saw happen, what we felt happen. Knowing that we can feel that again.

For people of a certain age, we experienced a rapid period of progress in the early 2010s. Seeing a black president, seeing gay marriage legalized, seeing artistic, athletic, cultural, experimental, scientific, technological excellence, all firsthand. It was assumed as a given that tomorrow would be better than today. That we could and should always look ahead. However, we’ve now had just as much if not more time with the opposite. The future is uncertain, looming, terrifying, expected to be worse. We are not only no longer considered in the equation of what comes next, but removed entirely, with our say or control stripped away. Progress forward feels like a commodified buzzword used to continue someone else’s grift instead of a communal belief, a fallacy of “inevitability” tacked on a shitty data center pitch, thrusting us in a direction we don’t want to go. The past established its mental dominance. Thoughts of “man remember when…” or “return to…” or “the gold ole days” seem to be all the scraps we’re given. Gradual regression, culturally, behaviorally, socially, artistically, seems to be the defining trait of the last decade or so. Simultaneously, the idea of anything communal, anything shared or common, feels like a daydream of a bygone era. We’re in times of encouraged selfishness, of narcissism, of “Main Characters”, of Me, Me, Me, Me, Me. The Venn diagram has been surgically split and tailored to the size of two separate Cheerios. It’s less important to be In as it is to be seen as not being Out. It can be hard to escape this ugly, greedy shamelessness when it’s so tirelessly, relentlessly reinforced on a societal scale. However, every so often, this façade cracks. Just enough light seeps through to illuminate what’s been hidden. One thing I noticed throughout the 2 months of Knicks victories and celebrations and flooding the streets and nodding at fellow fans on the subway was that the deep rooted cynicism, the security blanket of irony poisoning, felt noticeably absent. In those moments of pure communal elation, the walls and buffers and barriers dissolved in the sea of hugs and dumb smiles and raucous cheers. No need to worry about being cringe, no protective veil of detachment, no synthetic social stock market mattered, we were all truly living here and now, for the first time in a long, long time. And you know what? It felt great for everyone. These moments served as reminders that underneath that saturated selfishness, that trained attack dog hatred of the Other, those endless qualifiers that separate us mentally, there is still commonality, there is still collectivism, there is still warmth to be found.

If these last few weeks have shown us anything, it’s that it is possible to fight those culturally dictated urges, to find that common ground with each other again. It’s always been there, latent, waiting for us to return back to it like an old friend, to come to our fucking senses once again and finally (hopefully) move forward. I can speak personally, in the elated drunken euphoric haze of that night, wandering around downtown Manhattan with a small group simply looking for others to share this experience, this moment in life with, I felt that long buried communal sensation emerge once again. Strangers, friends, and everything in between, truly united by something. It was still possible.

Whenever a big trauma hits, economic, cultural, societal, a fucking global pandemic, we always naively assume things will act as some large factory reset for us. A sort of “time to get serious” wake-up-call. But we’ve seen, time and time again through the 21st century, that it usually gives way to reinforcement, to regression and selfishness and spiraling further inward. Reverting back to some childish, petulant, adamant state of being as a reflex. In his novel Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon writes about the state of New York in the days and months following the 9/11 attacks, seeing stunned and stunted grown adults wandering the streets, now infantilized, dressing and talking and behaving like children again. Not knowing what to do, where to go from here, afraid of what the future brings, people start to go backwards. Maybe to retrace our steps and find where we took a wrong turn to wind up where we did, maybe to ease the mental responsibilities, maybe just to pretend for a little while. Eventually though, those trauma responses develop into permanent habits, ones that can be incredibly laborious to undo.

“Can’t you feel it, how everybody’s regressing? 11 September infantilized this country. It had a chance to grow up, instead it chose to default back to childhood. I’m in the street yesterday, behind me are a couple of high-school girls having one of these teenage conversations … and when I finally turn to look at them, here are these two women my own age. Older! your age, who should know better, really. Like trapped in a fuckin time warp or something.”

Sound familiar? It’s hard to reason with an entire culture locked in this perpetual state, forever preserved in their elementary or middle or high school amber, because it’s truly difficult to blame them. Can you really fault all the retail therapists and the “I’m just a girl”s and the “It’s not that deep”ers and the fandom freaks and the nostalgia freebasers? Those just seem to be the only ways we’ve been given to cope for a long time now. “Growing up”, as you may call it, requires a true confrontation with the Now, without a buffer of detached cynical irony for protection. For the last decade, it didn’t seem like many of us had any interest in doing that. I’m guilty myself. My nausea for things that feel overwhelmingly Too 2020s has been a weight on my shoulders for years at this point, is that not just a symptom of the same trauma response? One could argue my calls for looking to the past, to eras of art and culture that we can glean lessons from is just more of that same narcotic nostalgia gripping the entire country. Aren’t we all just burying our heads in the sand?

Maybe then, the inverse in the opposite direction can be true too. If a large enough trauma can propel us all into perpetual arrested development and rip away our commonality, our sense of shared community, maybe a large enough joy can have just as powerful of a latent, lasting impact. Maybe we can bottle these feelings we’ve all experienced the last few weeks and keep them with us for the next rainy day. Maybe we can actually use this inertia to finally, miraculously, step forward for the first time in years. We can remember what we witnessed, what we lived through, what we experienced moment to moment and who we did it with. Remind ourselves that it was real, it was possible. Maybe if we all hold up our end of the bargain, if we all play our role on one big team, we can make it to greatness once again after such a long, painful drought. After all, we just saw it happen firsthand.