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Keidel: Hey Knicks Fans, Why Can't You Just Admit That Your Team Stinks?

By Jason Keidel
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Over the weekend I had a haunting but didactic Facebook chat with a Knicks fan.

Her family and mine lived in the same building during the 1970s and '80s, and her brother and I were quite tight as kids. He was a certified genius, and I later found out that he got his Ph.D in astrophysics and now teaches at a major university in the Midwest. And though I don't know her nearly as well, she surely inherited the family's robust brain cells.

Oddly, he's allergic to sports, while she's a rabid NBA devotee. And her brand of basketball sustenance is the New York Knickerbockers. Nothing odd about that, of course. But what I found so troubling about our dialogue this weekend, which served as a microcosm of many Knicks fans, was her refusal to concede that the Knicks are a terrible team.

"We'll win real soon," she asserted. "Then we'll be on our way. You'll see!"

"Why won't you just admit they're awful?" I pleaded

"Because they don't," she insisted. "We're just in a slump."

"Even if the slump has lasted 40 years?"

"No one cares about the past."

This is her honest, earnest assessment of a team that enters this week with a 4-18 mark after a month. A team that let Kemba Walker moonwalk through its defense for a game-winning layup. A team that hasn't been relevant in over a decade. A team that hasn't won a title since "The Odd Couple" was the hot sitcom, since gas was 40 cents per gallon, since "The Godfather" won the Oscar, since the Nixon Administration, since Phil Jackson was wearing shorts and setting picks for Earl Monroe, since Joe Frazier and Walt Frazier shared the MSG marquee.

She and other jaded Knicks fans say I want them to abandon the orange and blue, leave their childhood heroes fading from consciousness. Untrue. If there's one thing all sports fans understand, it's that you can no more pick a new favorite team any more than you can pick new parents.

What I ask of Knicks fans is a modicum of objectivity, a vaguely linear and logical approach to your favorite franchise. If they suck, just say so. Bite into your ballers and inject some venom and vitriol into a team that is just a few minutes ahead of the historically bad 76ers. Scream. Shout. Shriek. Call them to task. Skip that game on a frigid weekday. Go to a movie. Spend a memorable night away from the forgettable Knicks.

There is no public or implicit pact with your favorite team that says you must suffer every indignity with a smile or denial. Yes, there's a certain illogic that comes with being a fan; a jaded, junkyard existence we embrace despite the hardships that come with wins and losses. Our self-esteem is literally tethered to the fates of our franchises.

But you're allowed to say your team sucks. In fact, it's part of the perverse pleasure of sports. Surely Cubs fans take some comfort in their century-long malaise. It gives them a common, reflexive reflection, a shared pain that only they fathom.

Red Sox fans had the same discourse, and a shared enemy : the Yankees. It made 2004 so much sweeter, thundering back from 0-3 in the ALCS to topple the hated pinstripes, who spawned the curse and all the cursing from Bostonians for 86 years. So when the Cubs win -- and, someday, the Knicks -- your visceral joy will be worth all the desolate decades.

But if you insist that the Knicks are one play or one player from the top, then you're not only impossible to take seriously, but you also cheat yourself out of the outhouse-to-penthouse thrill of a championship.

It doesn't feel that way now, but the Knicks -- like the Mets and even the Jets -- will win a world title someday. If you're 80 years old, you may not see it. But if you're a steadfast member of the key demo, you will wipe a few tears from your cheeks as your forlorn franchise finally wins the last game of the season.

But the stark, dark reality today is that the Knicks are dwelling at the absolute bottom of the NBA barrel. And you have to shove your face into it and see them at their bottom-feeding worst before you can appreciate their rise from the muck of failure.

There's no fun in being Fan Guy. Or Fan Gal.

Follow Jason on Twitter @JasonKeidel.  

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