GO NEW YORK, GO NEW YORK, GO!

On the night the Knicks won, all four of us were on the same couch on a Saturday. I genuinely cannot remember the last time that happened. We are a family of four with four schedules, four screens, and four firm positions on whether the thermostat is a setting or a personal attack -- and there we were, shoulder to shoulder, screaming at the same television, at the same man, at the same moment.

I grew up on the Jets, which is to say I grew up understanding that loyalty is mostly grief with a season ticket. So I know how to wait. My husband is a different animal: a Real Fan, and he needs you to know it. He can name every player who has touched the roster for fifty years. He knows the exact date of the last championship the way other men know their anniversaries, which is to say better. For weeks he has narrated these playoffs from the couch like a man who personally scouted each of these guys — and, this is the part that kills me, bitching the entire time. Up by twenty: bitching. He is incapable of a joy that isn't also a complaint. It's beautiful.

And my daughters, who don't, as a rule, follow sports, who treat their father's sports knowledge as weather they have to live near, were on their feet. Screaming. Texting friends. Wearing orange, voluntarily.

That's the part that gets me -- not that the Knicks won, that they got into my house. That they got all four of us looking in the same direction.

Here is the fact my husband has delivered to me, unprompted, every single day this month: the last time the Knicks won it all, Richard Nixon was President and had not yet resigned. Fifty-three years. You have to go back to a year before the country had learned the word "Watergate" to find the last time this city agreed, out loud, at the same time, on something happy.

Because, let's be real, this city does not always agree on things. We are eight million people who chose to live stacked on top of one another precisely so we'd have something to be specific about. We do not agree on the bike lanes, the congestion pricing, the rats (menace or mascot?), or whether you make eye contact on the subway or are you crazy?...that's how it starts. There are a million things to think about here and a million more to complain about and almost nothing, nothing, that all of us will admit to wanting at the same time.

The morning after the Knicks won, Fifth Avenue belonged to the Puerto Rican Day Parade; two weeks before that, the same avenue belonged to Israel Day. That's the city in a nutshell — a million colors, histories, accents and grievances, each one marching up the same stretch of pavement under its own flag. And, yet, for one week in June, every single one of those flags had a Knicks jersey thrown on over it.

This city is world-class at coming together for a catastrophe — closing ranks when something is trying to kill it is practically our cardio. Coming together to be happy, in the street, for no reason but that something good finally happened? That we'd forgotten how to do.

And the men who did this to us are, infuriatingly, lovely. A point guard shorter than half my Pilates class, who plays like he's solving a word problem, and his best friends from college, who had already won two titles together because some people just decide to be like that. A coach fired four separate times by men who are, presumably, having a difficult week. Down twenty-nine in a single game, they came back anyway -- came back from a double-digit hole in every game of the Finals -- which is not a strategy, it's a refusal to lose, and it's ours.

And off the court, they are, by every account, exemplary. Ask anyone who's run into them around the city: they stop for the photo, they sign the kid's notebook, they say thank you and mean it. No chairs thrown, no drama, no crass tabloid fodder. The best basketball team in the country, and not an a-hole among them.

I've felt a lot of ways about this city lately. Tired. Priced out in spirit. Half-listening to everyone who keeps announcing that New York is over, that the smart money already left for the South, where the only thing that ever happens to you is weather.

New York is not over. New York is not dead. New York is not moving to Florida.

New York is four people on one sofa who cannot agree on a simple sushi order, agreeing on this.

New York is Frank Sinatra belting it out, at the top of his lungs.

And on the night the Knicks won, New York was eight million of us belting it right back — eight million people who agree on nothing, out in the same streets at the same hour, bursting with the same impossible, otherworldly joy, over a basketball team.

Find me a better word than miracle. I'll wait.