Expectation-defying Knicks are a gift to New York fans

It is hard to imagine a time when we needed this more, frankly, this flabbergasting, dumbfounding, out-of-the-(orange-and)-blue surprise of a Knicks season. Forget the way our world at-large has been upended the last year. Let’s just keep it to our little sporting corner of that solar system.

Let’s remember what these last few years have been like around here, an endless morass of underachievement and underperformance, summer to winter, fall to spring, one sporting calamity after another, an endless loop of failure, of frustration, of futility. The Islanders gave a whiff of oxygen last summer, and maybe that was a harbinger. They share the Knicks’ colors, after all, and when they beat the Panthers, Capitals and Flyers in the NHL’s bubble, playoffs they reminded a faction of New York of the possibilities of hope.