Well, wouldja look at us:
We’re back!
After a long, cold lonely winter that’s lasted damn near a decade, when New York City’s nine pro teams in the four major sports couldn’t get out of their own way, we have finally crawled back to where we should’ve been all along: we’re players again, all across town, all across the spectrum.
Manhattan and Brooklyn. Queens and the Bronx. New Jersey and Long Island. No matter where you hang your hat in our marvelous metropolis, you have reason to smile today. When the Islanders qualified as the 16th team in the 16-team Stanley Cup playoffs Wednesday night, it meant that for the first time since 1994 — and only the second time since the Devils moved east from Denver in ‘82, making us a nine-team sporting megalopolis — that all five winter sports teams qualified for the playoffs in the same spring.
It will take some curious twists and turns for the next few weeks to match ’94, when we not only had one champion (the Rangers) and one runner-up (the Knicks) but also had quite the series of intramural skirmishes: Rangers-Islanders in the first round as a warm-up to the forever Rangers-Devils war in the Eastern Finals, and Knicks-Nets in a spirited four-game series to jump-start the basketball spring.
That’ll be hard to duplicate.
But that’s fine. It is. We’re in play again. And it’s that way all over town. For the first time ever, eight of our nine teams are either in the playoffs, or coming off a playoff season. The Mets and Yankees combined for 200 wins and two playoff berths in 2022. The Giants fell out of the sky and actually won a playoff game in Minnesota.
(And if the Jets are the kid with his nose pressed against the candy-store window, unable to come up with the coinage for a Hershey bar … well, just about every NFL prognosticator on earth believes the days of their 12-year playoff drought might be numbered, assuming they ever do get around to signing the Prince of Darkness.)
“It’s good to be a part of this,” Islanders coach Lane Lambert said late Wednesday night. “This is the exciting time.”
It is around here, anyway.
Look: it is true that we are still hog-tied to a long and grueling skein since we last celebrated a championship around here — and, as always, here is the place to insert our apologies to NYCFC, which did win the MLS Cup 2021. But as of Friday it will be 4,086 days since the Giants walked off the Lucas Oil Stadium field 21-17 winners over the Patriots, clutching the Vince Lombardi Trophy. That’s on the record, sure.
But so is this:
New York is back in play. We’re back in the game, regardless of who you root for, who you care about, in whom you invest the most important part of your sporting soul.
It was back on Dec. 20, 2013, when we ran a back-page headline of a grimy apple with the headline: “ROTTEN TO THE CORE.” And, man, were we ever. No baseball teams made the playoffs that year. No football teams. The Rangers and Nets were scuffling, though they would make the playoffs in the new year; the Islanders, Devils and Knicks all shared a walk-up cold-water flat in Oblivion City.
It was bad. It felt every bit as bad as 1966, which for years was the zinc standard for wretched Sporting New York, the Yanks finishing last for the first time in 54 years, the Mets ninth, the Giants 1-12-1, the Knicks and Rangers a combined 48-91-11.
Slowly, we saw some sparks. The Rangers gathered momentum as 2013 turned into ’14, made it all the way to the Cup finals. The Mets made an unexpected (and still hard-to-believe) run to the World Series in 2015.The Yankees will forever believe they were the uncrowned champs of 2017. The Nets were maybe the length of Kevin Durant’s toenails away from doing something special in 2021. The Isles sniffed the Cup Finals that year, too.
Here and there, we started to breathe again. But it’s only now that we’re hitting our stride. Maybe we can’t replicate the spring of ’94, when not only were the five winter teams beating each other up but Buck Showalter’s Yankees were dominating the American League for the first time in a generation. Maybe we’re a long way from the 1969-70 run of the Jets, Mets and Knicks. But New York matters as a sports town again.
We’re back. Back in play. Back in the fight. Wouldja look at us.