The Knicks seem to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through my mind last night while taking in the denouement. I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known to me, of the great power and malice at times of the New York Knickerbockers. Full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer. Investigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may be lodged there. How far beyond all utterance are their linked analogies? What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! A chasm seemed opening in the playoffs, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned us to leap down among them. The Cavs lived like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs. Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; Harden would think the deep to be hoary.
The pressure of the finals is immense. Can they ascend to the heavens, capering upon the astral plane. Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of them if they lose? So you suppose Jalen Brunson is afraid of the devil? All these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without. The gale that now hammers at them to stave them, they can turn it into a fair wind that will drive them towards home. During the violence of the gale, they had only steered according to its vicissitudes. Fix your eye upon this strange, crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass of the playoffs—this green, barnacled thing. Ye gods! It's a trophy. Do you hear those faint caterwauls, whispering of a conqueror's parade sweeping down through the canyon of heroes? Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!