Andy Baron and Greg Armstong
Greg Armstrong had followed the routine hundreds of times. The night before a Knicks game, he’d lay out his orange-and-blue clothes, so he could change speedily in the bathroom of a Westchester ShopRite, where he is a manager, and get to Madison Square Garden early. This time the task was tougher than usual. Not only because Armstrong owns more than 200 pieces of Knicks gear, stored in his Knicks mancave. But because after 34 years of paying for season tickets, he would be attending his first-ever NBA Finals game, the first the Knicks had played at the Garden since 1999.
The team had won an astounding 13 playoff games in a row, many of them in routs, and were returning to New York up two games to none on the San Antonio Spurs. Armstrong, 62, knew the next two wins, to close out the series, would not come easily. He bypassed the light-up sweater — that’s for Christmas Day games only. He looked at the blue Jalen Brunson jersey hanging in his closet. That was it. Brunson, the team’s leader, hadn’t shot very well in San Antonio. Wearing his jersey to the Garden could only help.
About 90 minutes away, over in North Jersey, Andy Baron, a 67-year-old lawyer who is now a state administrative-law judge, was working through his own Knicks nerves, reading every newspaper story about the team he could find, flipping through NBA podcasts, searching for signs and portents. Knicks season tickets have been in the Baron family for 36 years, long enough to produce three generations of hopes and heartache but no first-hand experience of a title. The last time the Knicks won an NBA championship was in 1973, when Baron was 14 years old. Because that Knicks team included Bill Bradley, who would go on to become a U.S. senator from New Jersey — and who would be the 21-year-old Baron’s boss for one memorable, highly influential internship — there was no debate about what Baron would be wearing: a crisp white vintage Knicks jersey bearing No. 24 and Bradley’s name on the back.
