Day 5,243 Cancelled

Freddy Peralta has joined Harry Parker and Jerry Koosman in that very exclusive club of Mets pitchers who have started and won on the day after the Knicks have clinched an NBA title. It’s a small sample size, but the Mets are 3-0 in those situations.

May 9, 1970: The Mets and Giants are embroiled in a 4-4 tie until the bottom of the fifth at Shea, when the home team busts out for nine hits, scoring eight runs to tie the franchise mark for most in an inning. Ex-Giant Dave Marshall drives in two. Art Shamsky drives in two. Kooz himself — who will effectively disperse 10 hits over seven-and-two-thirds — drives one in. So does Tommie Agee on the afternoon he extends his Mets-record hitting streak to 20. Ron Taylor comes on in the eighth and retires the five hitters he faces to seal the 14-5 win over San Francisco.

May 11, 1973: It’s another tight game, this time at Three Rivers Stadium. Mets 2 Pirates 2. Again, the fifth inning provides the turning point, albeit with less explosiveness than three years earlier. Against Dock Ellis, the Mets string together a hit-by-pitch, a two-out single, and one more hit besides from Jim Gosger to take the lead. Gosger is 46 years from being declared dead at the 2019 Citi Field reunion of the 1969 Mets despite continuing to live. Here, in another of his fortuitously timed cameos (Jim was a Met for slices of 1969 and 1973, but not at all in between), he is very much alive and well, and so are the 1973 Mets. Bud Harrelson works out a bases-loaded walk in the seventh to extend the Mets’ edge to 4-2, giving Parker the breathing room to withstand a Willie Stargell RBI double in the bottom of the inning. Harry gives way to Tug McGraw, who stays in the rest of the way. In the ninth, the Buccos will load the bases, but the Tugger will wriggle out of it, and the Mets come away 4-3 winners.

The Mets game of June 14, 2026, was also a win. Mets 8 Braves 1, a romp unlike the post-Knick successes in that it was taking place right in front of me. I was 7 in 1970 and not being taken to Mets games. A few Knicks games, it so happens, that first championship season, but not the Mets. At age 10 in 1973, I wasn’t making a habit of flying off to Pittsburgh for the weekend, though I can say I had been at the Garden for Game Three of those NBA Finals the Knicks finished off in five in Los Angeles. Here, it was no aberration to find myself situated in toasty warm Promenade with my friend Mark Simon on Sunday afternoon. It was my third Mets game in five days. I haven’t gone to see the Knicks since 1995.

Things change. The day-after victory habit hasn’t, I’m happy to confirm. We (the Mets) were down after a half-inning by a run. Peralta was, per usual, making the least out of the most pitches possible. After he’d thrown 26 of them, the Braves had a run in and the bases loaded. Somehow — and until he demonstrates some consistency, Freddy gets the “somehow” treatment when things go well — he escaped the jam.

Then the Mets, perhaps inspired by the blaring of the public address system to remind us the Knicks had emerged champions the night before in San Antonio (you could hear the hype all the way to Texas), went out and trampled Bryce Elder for four runs in the bottom of the first. Mark and I were able to settle into our annual game of trivia, where the goal isn’t to answer correctly on the first swing but suss out what the questioner is looking for after a series of largely inscrutable hints. My questions tend to be asked in sixteen parts. I’m loads of fun to sit next to at Mets games.

Mark was unGosgerian in his timing when it came to excusing himself in the middle of the fifth inning. He missed A.J. Ewing’s home run, which is to say he also missed Marcus Semien’s home run on the very next pitch. The bottle of water he went off to refill, however, appeared superbly refreshing, and they do show replays. They showed the home runs a lot. They showed Knicks highlights a lot. They showed special celebrity visitor and Cardinals fan Jon Hamm sitting in a fancy seat down below pointing to himself wearing a Knicks cap. Why they didn’t show the Mad Men clip of him as Don Draper singing “Meet the Mets” to Freddy Rumsen (or at least the time he’s out for drinks telling someone Bill Bradley’s having a helluva year) is beyond my Mets A/V comprehension. My week at Citi Field exposed me to unprecedented amounts of sanctioned rah-rah for a non-Mets team. If the Mets were being supportive of their fellow local athletic squad, good for them. If the Mets were glomming onto someone else’s orange-and-blue ascent, good for them, too. Steal that valor. Distract us from the tenor of the baseball campaign to date.

Not that we needed to have our attention diverted from the Mets on Sunday. The Braves never got it going, the Mets just kept on coming, adding a couple of runs to secure an 8-1 triumph. The PA remained too loud the entire day. The Knicks were still champions. And I could stop keeping track of something I’ve been monitoring since 2015.

Every time it became mathematically certain no New York-and-immediate vicinity team would win any among a Super Bowl, a Stanley Cup, an NBA Finals, or a World Series, I would do the math. By November 1, 2015, when the Mets opted out of that year’s Fall Classic sans trophy, it had been 1,365 days since the Giants had won Super Bowl XLVI, or 46 for you non-Romans out there, on February 5, 2012. In the interim, the Devils in nearby Newark had lost a Stanley Cup in the final round of 2012 (127 days) and the Rangers had done the same in 2014 (859 days). Even the 2015 World Series going not the way a significant percentage of the Metropolitan Area population wished hardly indicated we were in a title drought. But it was beginning to get a bit parched in these parts.

There hadn’t been a yawning gap from New York championship to New York championship since the white space that filled October 16, 1962 (Yankees win World Series) to January 12, 1969 (Jets win Super Bowl). I come along as a sports fan in the ensuing months, and I soon got the idea that New York might be Titletown, USA. Only 277 days elapse between the Jets setting the standard and the Mets matching it on October 16, 1969. The city and suburbs needed a mere 204 days to gets its fix once again, courtesy of the 1969-70 Knicks, the first championship team I lived and died but didn’t really have to die with on a daily and nightly basis. The 1969 Mets I joined already in progress. I was ready for the Knicks from their opening tip on October 14. My parents went to Opening Night at Madison Square Garden — hours after Agee made his two immortal catches — and reported back that the Knicks had beaten the Seattle Supersonics. We (the Knicks) got off to a 5-0 start, lost one to the San Francisco Warriors, then won their next eighteen. I was hooked for the foreseeable future.

Banner from a championship season.

We (the family) had season tickets. Mom and Dad would go the Garden on Saturday nights and some Tuesday nights. My father would use them for business in the ways one used tickets for the hottest game in town otherwise. I remember a lot of sitting at the dinner table listening to Marv Albert. Dad was into it. Mom was into it. I was into it. My sister put up with it. A few times we got to go. I still have the felt KNICKERBOCKERS pennant from my first non-circus trip to the Garden. No wonder that by May 8, 1970, the night we listened anxiously for Marv to let us know if Willis Reed was gonna play Game Seven (ABC’s telecast was blacked out in New York), it meant the world that the Knicks beat the Lakers. It absolutely did to this 7-year-old.

it meant maybe a touch less but still loads 1,098 days later when the Knicks beat the Lakers again, on May 10, 1973. Toward the end of the 1970-71 season, after close to two years of hanging on every jump shot and rebound, I found myself caring tangibly less, as if I had just come out of a hypnotic spell. I went from “the Knicks are on!” to “oh, the Knicks are on.” Maybe it had something to do with my parents giving up the season tickets. They got them back in 1972. The seats weren’t as good, but my sister and I got to go a little more frequently, including to one game per each round of the playoffs. After the Knicks took a 3-1 lead and headed to L.A. in the 1973 Finals, Suzan and I calculated we’d get to go the potential clincher if the Knicks had the decency to lose Game Five on the road. Yet I was too much of a fan at age 10 to mess with karma. I was quite delighted to watch the second Knick championship get won on TV.

The family kept the season tickets for one more year. Going to the Garden never got old, but the Knicks had. Willis, Dave DeBusschere, and Jerry Lucas were all on the verge of retirement. The last of our games in person, against the Celtics in the 1973-74 Eastern Conference finals, was the kind of loss that told a person who paid attention, even if that person was only 11 years old, that an era was ending. The Knicks were eliminated in Boston.

New York’s title bounty continued apace, anyway, with the other professional basketball team for whom I had developed an affinity, the Nets of the ABA, winning their first championship, exactly one year after the Knicks had won their second. In 734 days, the Nets would do it again. Hence, from January 12, 1969, to May 13, 1976, New Yorkers had been party to six champagne celebrations, almost one per year. Then came the Yankees of 1977 and 1978; the Islanders of 1980 through 1983; the 1986 Mets; 1986 Giants; the 1990 Giants; the 1994 Rangers; the 1995 Devils; the unwanted but undeniable Yankees of 1996 and 1998 through 2000; the 2000 and 2003 Devils; the 2007 Giants; and the last gasp of the Core Four in the 2009 World Series. When Eli Manning bested Tom Brady for the second time, on February 5, 2012, the New York-area sporting public had a chance to revel in 26 titles in just over 43 years. Understandably, few people would have said “YAY!” 26 times, for we differentiate in our sporting loyalties, given that these are four sports and they encompass are nine local teams, spawning direct and/or emotional rivalries. I can think of seven titles right away I could have done without. But they were there if my neighbors wanted them.

Then, following the 2011 Giants’ trip into the history books, nothing. Some close calls, à la the 2015 World Series, and some ancillary trophies, like those earned by New York FC in the MLS in 2021 and the New York Liberty in the WNBA in 2024, but nothing in what one might by ingrained habit refer to as The Big Four. The longest the Metropolitan Area had to wait between 1/12/1969 and 2/5/2012, was the 1,700 days that spanned the Devils on 6/9/2003 and the Giants on 2/3/2008. We passed that shortly before the 2016 Mets lost their Wild Card game. The title drought was in full effect.

It grew and grew and grew until it threatened to surpass the granddaddy drought of them all, the 5,843 days between the New York Giants winning the World Series in 1905 and the New York Giants next winning the World Series in 1921. Professional sports basically had the Big One in those days. The Yankees were kept from the World Series in those days. Those days had something going for them. As of Saturday night, June 13, 2026, the title drought had grown to 5,242 days. We were less than two years from making John McGraw feel not so bad about the outcomes of the 1911, 1912, 1913, and 1917 World Series (not to mention getting robbed of the 1908 National League pennant). But that stuff’s for ancient history now.

Saturday night, the Knicks put an end to all the counting. New York — along with, one supposes, Raleigh, N.C., home of the newly crowned Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes — can lay claim to Titletown honors. The Knicks are the NBA champions. I lived it in 1970 and 1973. I drifted away from them in 1974. I feinted back toward them now and then in succeeding decades, but not at all in this century. The Nets maintained my affinity, from Long Island to New Jersey to Brooklyn. Strangely enough, it’s stronger than ever. When it comes to basketball allegiance, I am Moe Szyslak explaining to Homer Simpson why his tavern lacked that hot new attraction every sports bar in the country was featuring by the early 1990s. “Well, it was either cable or the mechanical bull. I made my choice and I stand by it.” Cut to Moe’s mechanical bull, covered in cobwebs. I’m a Nets fan. They won 20 games this year and came in sixth in the draft lottery.

I used to be a Knicks fan. Their run through the 2025-26 playoffs moved me little, except for a touch of resentment every time I read or heard that they were unlike any other local sports franchise because they alone in their sport represent everybody in New York. Echoes of October 1996, when “everybody in New York” allegedly pulled for the “Miracle” Yankees. Except this time, I didn’t have an October of 1986 to present as evidence of short municipal memories. May of 1976 was a long time ago. The ABA disappeared that month. I’m still waiting for the Nets to totally get the hang of this NBA thing.

Searching old haunts for new enthusiasm. Couldn’t find it.

I know how being a Nets fan works. I know I exist, even if relatively few others of my ilk do as well. Yet when the Knicks verged on winning it all and then did win it all, I was…honestly…not as annoyed by it as I thought I’d be. New York needed a championship of the first order (as long as it wasn’t captured by the Yankees). I’m genuinely happy for whoever’s genuinely happy about this. Sheesh, 53 years is too long to begrudge anybody, except the Yankees. I tried to gin up Knick enthusiasm on behalf of my younger self, but nah, this one isn’t for contemporary me. It doesn’t have to be. I’ve got the Nets and their No. 6 draft pick to maybe do something useful with. I’ve got the Mets beating the Braves two out of three. I’ve got sixteen-part trivia questions to craft for the next time I see Mark Simon. I’ll always have what the Knicks did in 1969-70 and 1972-73 and what those teams meant to me then and still mean to me now. I’m good with all that.

I know from experience how great it is to be with a champion. I’m satisfied to be proximate to one for a change.

Mark is writing an Amazin’ weekly newsletter commemorating the 40th anniversary of the greatest championship of all, that of the 1986 Mets. Learn more about it here. And if by some chance you were at Game Four last week for the comeback of comebacks AND at Shea for Game Six and THAT comeback of comebacks, let us know, because Mark would love to talk to you.