SAN ANTONIO — The New York Knicks are the champions of the National Basketball Association, and those absolutely needed to be the first dozen words of this piece.I never thought I would type them, and you bet I felt it in my hands when I did. For many years, I would have believed in Santa, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy before I believed in the Knicks as the last team standing.But here they were Saturday night in San Antonio, eliminating the same opponent in Game 5 of the NBA Finals that eliminated them in Game 5 in Madison Square Garden in 1999, the last time the Knicks advanced to the championship round. Twenty-seven years after Tim Duncan lowered the boom on them, Jalen Brunson was the hammer and the otherworldly Victor Wembanyama was the nail.At long, long last, the big city recaptured the city game a couple of hundred miles from Houston, where they blew a 3-2 finals lead in 1994. The Knicks weren’t blowing anything this time around, and there is no need to offer a detailed rundown of why. You know the drill by now.They shared the ball on offense and got into people’s faces on defense. Above all, they loved playing for one another, just like the franchise’s only other two title teams — the 1970 and ’73 Knicks, led by Walt Frazier and Willis Reed.Frazier said multiple times that these Knicks were just like his all-for-one, one-for-all Knicks. He told The Athletic after the Game 1 victory over the Spurs that theirs was “a season of destiny” and that the captain, Brunson, has “the tenacity of Willis Reed and he’s got my cool.”Beyond all that, in the frantic final seconds of Game 4, OG Anunoby made that OMG play near the Garden rafters that will be talked about as long as this league exists.These Knicks, as a whole, will also be talked about 100 years from now. They seized the championship by winning 15 of their last 16 postseason games, including 13 in a row by a combined 273 points, unprecedented domination in the NBA playoffs.They accomplished so much on the court, and impacted their region so much off it, that they don’t merely deserve to go down as the finest Knicks team ever.They deserve to go down as the greatest team in the history of New York sports.How do you define greatness?Of course, “greatest” is a subjective term applied by flawed humans who cherry-pick statistics and other methods of measuring performance to support a case. These are exclusively mine as someone who has watched and processed sports for more than half a century and has covered them in the New York area for 40 years.The titanic teams from segregated times are eliminated. Babe Ruth would have found a way to be special in any era, but sorry, the 1927 Yankees and any team in any league that shut out Black athletes — given the moral offense and the record-breaking accomplishments of athletes of color to come — simply cannot qualify. The Yanks didn’t suit up a Black player until Josh Hart’s great uncle, Elston Howard, appeared in 1955, so I count the 1998 Yankees, who won 125 games, including a then-American League-record 114 in the regular season, as the gold standard of New York’s most successful franchise.