Ewing Days
Morning Dose: Monday, June 15
☀️ Good Morning:
I was trying to explain to my young daughters why fully grown adults react the way they do when their favorite team wins a championship.
You’ve surely seen a million reaction videos over the past few days in New York.
The best answer I could give them is that sports is one of the few things that truly keeps you young.
I told them how everything changes when you get older. There’s less novelty to life. Eventually you feel as if you've seen and done it all. We try to outrun that feeling by traveling or chasing new hobbies, but genuinely new experiences are harder and harder to come by.
It’s a big reason why becoming a parent (or grandparent) is so exhilarating. It allows you to see the world through a child’s eyes again. What’s better than watching the next generation visit Disney World for the first time, or creep down the stairs to find what Santa brought on Christmas morning?
That is exactly why sports matter so much. It turns out to be one of the few things you still get to experience firsthand, as if you were that little kid all over again.
This newsletter, Knicks Film School, it all started with a love affair I found in elementary school. That kid couldn’t get enough, whether playing basketball with my friends in my driveway, watching on television, or going to games with my dad.
That kid was a Mets, Knicks, Jets and Whalers fan (God help me!)
If you had told him the Knicks and “Whalers” would somehow win championships on back-to-back nights, he would have believed you because kids believe. But life quickly taught me that would be a fairy tale.
Well, the Knicks and the ugly facsimile of the Whalers are champions on back-to-back nights, each dominating the postseason with identical 16–3 records.
When my daughters asked me why grown adults come undone over a silly game, I was right to say winning makes you feel young again.
What I should have added is how it makes us feel alive. In a world of constant distraction, deep fakes and decisiveness, for at least one moment, we can all look up at the same thing, where there’s no debate about what we are seeing, the scoreboard a remaining truth teller in society. We can feel good about something together. We can feel rewarded for a hobby that takes an incredible amount of our time and emotional energy.
Which brings me back to the rest of my childhood teams. The ones still waiting.
I am lucky enough to still have the Knicks in my life, while the Whalers left me long ago, replaced by what now remains the most significant franchise in sports to be stuck in a championship drought, the Toronto Maple Leafs. Perhaps the Leafs’ next chapter will begin with the #1 pick in the draft later this month.
The Mets sit in last place, but here we are writing and reading about them with our morning coffee, wondering if they have a magical run ahead of them this summer. The Jets are the Same Ol’ Jets, but come September I’ll convince myself this year is somehow different.
None of these teams owe me anything. They never did. That was never the point.
Because believing is the actual reward. It’s the part that keeps you young, keeps you alive, keeps you coming back for more. And if I’ve done this right, it’s the part I get to hand down to my daughters so one day they will know exactly what it feels like to be young when you are old.
🍎 BACK TO THE METS: While the Knicks give suffering fans a reason to believe that any team can someday find glory, the Mets took care of business against the Braves over the weekend to continue to tread water with a 3–3 homestand. There are plenty of positives, from A.J. Ewing (whom we will talk about next), Bo Bichette coming to life, Sean Manaea contributing, and the bullpen remaining a strength. Is it enough to turn around the season? Crazier things have happened (we just witnessed it with the Knicks). But even if it isn’t, there are at least some seeds of hope for the future.
