For a young Knicks fan, even one recently reaching adulthood, all they have ever really known is misery from their team, dysfunction, mismanagement and losing. So much losing.
So the tales that older fans tell of the championships — the first one being celebrated later this season on the 50th anniversary of the title and the second and last championship coming just three years later — are like something culled from the fiction racks at the library. They hear it and wonder if it really could have happened in this place.
But it wasn’t that long ago that the Knicks were regularly not only a contender with a belief that they could win the title, but doing it in a style that the city embraced just as tightly as those championship teams.