They won, Dad

A Knicks championship, grief, and the search for meaning

The clock ticked down to zero. Fans spilled into the streets from every direction. The city was a symphony of honking cars and elated screams. Skyscrapers flashed orange and blue beneath halos of fireworks. For the first time in 53 years, the New York Knicks were NBA champions.

For millions of people, this was a moment of profound joy — one over half a century in the making. For Dan Baltic, it was bittersweet.

Dan, a New York-based writer, lost his father, Peter, to cancer on May 9. Peter moved to New York in 1973, just in time to experience the Knicks’ last championship, and remained a fan for the rest of his life. He returned to New York after studying abroad in France and never left again.

“He thought it was the best city in the world,” Dan says.

As Dan watched his father rapidly decline in health, the Knicks playoff run was just beginning.

"Obviously the Knicks weren’t number 1 on my list of concerns,” Dan laughs. “But I did think… they’ll probably lose anyway.”

That’s what Dan, like all New Yorkers, had been conditioned to believe. He was never a huge fan, but his dad was, and he spent years watching him passionately yell at the TV. Loyal to the Knicks and Jets, Peter had been accustomed to sports disappointment. But regardless of the outcome, he continued to tune in. Quick to pull out a self-deprecating joke, Peter approached sports fandom the same way he approached life: with joy and humor.

Dan describes Peter with a deep sense of pride. “People were always comfortable around my dad because he was comfortable around everyone.”

As Peter’s condition worsened in his final weeks, he became less able to focus on the Knicks. Dan, meanwhile, found himself turning on games in moments when he needed a distraction.

“You want something that pulls you away from what you’re going through, and sports does that in a way other entertainment mediums don’t,” Dan explains. “You can’t really pause it. You want to see what is happening as it’s happening. You’re completely focused on what’s unfolding.”

After Peter passed away, the games became a point of connection between Dan and his uncle. In nightly phone calls, the two would discuss the Knicks ongoing run. Dan would repeatedly say, “They’re gonna win it for dad.”

“At first, I kind of believed it and kind of didn’t,” Dan admits. “It was a fun thing to say. But as the playoffs kept progressing, it started to feel like… well, actually, this is coming true.”

In a one-and-a half month stretch between April and June, the Knicks won 13 straight games. For Dan, the games had become more than a distraction.

“It was something that made me feel…,” he pauses, searching for the word. “It made me feel good.”

The manner of the wins felt as significant as the wins themselves. Dan recalls a particular phone call with his uncle on the evening of Game 4 of the Finals. The Spurs had taken a commanding twenty-seven point lead at halftime, and the two spoke as though the game was over.

“Then, they completely defied what we had already accepted as the outcome,” Dan says.

That night, disbelief swept over the entire city. The Knicks completed the largest comeback in NBA Finals history — winning on a miraculous tip-in in the final seconds — to give them a 3-1 series lead.

“If you’re depressed, or if you’ve become resigned to life giving you certain outcomes and you just have to roll with them…,” Dan reflects, “…being surprised in a positive way means a lot. To have something completely overturn your expectations and end happily is powerful.”

Dan isn’t a particularly religious person, but he speaks of this run with a sense of faith. He agrees there are parallels between sports fandom and religion: the way both ask people to transcend logic and believe in something bigger than themselves.

“I think that’s one of the reasons sports has this almost religious pull on people,” Dan says. “Not to talk down religion or anything, but instead of listening to stories about miracles, you’re watching something in real life that feels miraculous. And it can make a believer out of people.”

Saturday night, Dan sat in his apartment and watched intently as the Knicks played for the NBA championship. But with less than a minute remaining, his WiFi shut off. As he scrambled to pull up the game on his phone, he was overcome with a sense of certainty about how it was going to end.

“Partly because of the trajectory they had been on, the way they kept defying expectations at every turn… I felt like I knew they were going to win.”

Moments later, cheers rang out from the street below. The Knicks were NBA champions.

His uncle called, and the two shared a moment of celebration.

“It felt wonderful. It was a win, and that felt great. It was a long-awaited win. But there was also that bittersweet element of thinking, if only he could have been here.”

Dan stepped onto his balcony, where fireworks illuminated the Manhattan skyline.

“I was sitting with that feeling when the fireworks went off,” Dan recalls, “I took a picture, and it naturally brought me back to the tweet I’d made about my dad being a Knicks fan and how much he would have enjoyed this.”

Dan posted the photo with a short but poignant caption: They won, Dad

“It felt like a fitting exclamation point,” Dan explains. “It felt like a way of adding something to the celebration while also acknowledging what was missing.”

As he watched the sky light up, Dan found himself reflecting on the strange symmetry of it all.

“You want to believe that the passing of your loved ones isn’t random; that it has some sort of purpose, that there’s some kind of design,” Dan says. “They won the first year he got here, and then they finally won again at the end of his time here.”

The feeling had been building for weeks. In every comeback, in every improbable win, it became easier to believe that there was something carrying them forward.

“That’s something people naturally look for,” Dan says. “We superimpose meaning onto events. But one of the most difficult parts of grief is avoiding the trap of saying either that everything was part of some grand plan or that everything is completely random. Instead, you have to accept a certain level of uncertainty.”

The Knicks cannot erase Dan’s grief, or assign meaning to such a devastating loss. But in the weeks following his father’s death, they gave him something to believe in. And then, they gave him something to celebrate.

“I wish he could have seen it, but I absolutely wanted them to win. I wanted them to win for him. And they did.”

Dan turned to his dad’s favorite team as a distraction from losing him. Now, after experiencing a magical championship run, he feels a connection to them that didn’t exist before.

“I would like to believe there’s an afterlife, and if there is, I’d like to believe my dad saw this and was saying, ‘I knew they’d do it.’”

He pauses, then laughs.

“Or making some joke like, ‘Of course they’d wait until I leave.’”