The title. Frazier, Reed, Bradley, DeBusschere. Nobody in the building thought to remember it. Why would you remember the beginning of a wait?
The champions got old, on schedule. A conference final, and then the quiet.
The playoffs went on without them.
Nothing.
Nothing, again. You start to notice the pattern, or you start to drink.
The title core fully scattered now. The playoffs went on without them.
Nothing.
Nothing.
A first-round cameo. Out before the city learned the roster.
Nothing.
Bernard King arrived, and the building remembered it had a pulse.
King scored 44, then 44 again, on a taped and fevered everything — then they lost Game 7 in Boston. The most beautiful losing in franchise memory.
King's knee came apart in March. Then a frozen envelope handed them Patrick Ewing, and it felt, briefly, like the universe apologizing.
Rookie Ewing, a bad team around him. The apology came with conditions.
Nothing worth carving.
Pitino, pressing full-court, a playoff berth — a reason.
A division title. Then Jordan. Always, eventually, Jordan.
Out in the second round. The decade's villain was only warming up.
Swept by the Bulls. You could set a clock by it.
Riley arrived in a suit worth more than the arena. Took the Bulls to seven, and lost.
Charles Smith, under the rim, four times, the ball never going in. Bulls again.
The Finals, with Jordan off playing baseball and the door wide open — and Starks went 2-for-18 in Game 7. Hakeem and Houston walked through it.
Reggie Miller scored eight points in nine seconds, and the Garden went quiet in a way it never fully recovered from. Ewing's finger-roll rimmed out in Game 7.
Ran into 72 wins of Bulls. Nobody beat that team. The Knicks just lost to it on schedule.
A brawl, suspensions, a series handed to Miami by the league office and by gravity.
Pacers again. Reggie, again.
The eighth seed that reached the Finals. Houston's shot through Miami's heart, Larry Johnson's four-point play — and then a tired, Ewing-less team lost to San Antonio. The most romantic failure in league history.
The conference finals. Reggie Miller closed the door for the last time.
A first-round exit. Ewing was already gone, traded for parts.
The playoffs went on without them. That sentence was about to get a lot of use.
Nothing.
Isiah Thomas took the GM chair and began an experiment in how much a proud franchise could be made to suffer on purpose.
Nothing, expensively.
Larry Brown, 23 wins, the most miserable expensive basketball ever played.
A courtroom and an $11.6 million harassment verdict. A franchise embarrassed in a register that had nothing to do with basketball.
Twenty-three wins and the end of the Isiah era. Mercy, arriving slowly.
A roster gutted for cap space — a plan that required believing in 2010.
They cleared the room for LeBron. He chose Miami, on television. The room stayed empty.
Carmelo arrived; Boston swept them out in four. Star acquired, problem unsolved.
For twenty-six days in February, an undrafted guard named Jeremy Lin made the Garden the center of the earth. Then it ended. It always ends.
Fifty-four wins, and a playoff series won at last — the last one they'd win for ten years. Nobody knew that either.
Melo scored, and scored, and the team missed the playoffs around him.
Seventeen wins, the worst in franchise history, a triangle nobody could draw. They drafted a 7-foot-3 Latvian and called it hope.
Nothing. The triangle kept turning, gathering nothing.
The team president called the franchise star's friends a “posse,” and the season died of dysfunction before March.
Porzingis tore his ACL in February, dunking, mid-flight — the one good thing breaking in real time.
Seventeen wins again, a tank for a generational prize, and the lottery said no. Then every star they'd cleared the room for chose elsewhere. The room, again, stayed empty.
They hired serious adults — Leon Rose, then Tom Thibodeau — into a silence with no fans in it.
The Return. Thibodeau, forty-one wins, a four-seed, the Garden loud for the first time since the old century. Trae Young bowed at center court and ended it — but the building had a pulse.
The pulse faded; no playoffs. A reminder that a return is not a redemption.
Jalen Brunson, bought cheap and doubted loudly, won them a series — the first since 2013. The doubt began to look foolish.
Brunson became a star, the roster got hurt, and a gutted team took Indiana to a Game 7 before the bodies gave out.
The conference finals, and the Pacers again — beaten one round from the Finals, the year before the year. So close the city let itself believe.
Jalen Brunson, 45 points and Finals MVP. The largest comeback in Finals history. The Spurs in five. Fifty-three years. The wait finally has a number — and the number is over.