Better Days Won’t Haunt You

In order to tell you about the best rendition of “New York, New York” I’ve ever heard, I first have to tell you about the longest day I’ve ever spent in the state of Indiana.

It might be helpful to know that before I moved to the Midwest, my knowledge of the Hoosier State was pretty limited — so limited that I can write it all down in one short paragraph: Reggie Miller and the Pacers; Bob Knight and IU basketball; Peyton Manning and the Colts leaving Baltimore in 1984; the Jackson family and John Mellencamp; Notre Dame, for some reason; the home of the KKK; and, more than anything else, the pageantry of the Indianapolis 500. I could find it on a map, in other words, but even at Jenna Fischer’s peak, I couldn’t have told you she was from Fort Wayne. The state held little conscious appeal.

Beyond the other opportunities moving from the South to Chicago afforded me — public transportation and walkable neighborhoods, a central location to fly just about anywhere I wanted in America without the need for a redeye, in-person footwork demonstrations — one aspect I appreciated the moment I got here was the diversity of backgrounds I could find in a major city. It wasn’t just the obvious “cabbie from Ethiopia ranking awaze tibs” immigrant stuff, though I loved that, too; there were cultural nuances and regional distinctions even in flyover states I’d never thought about before. Such was the case with Indiana; the more people I met, the more I realized it was really three states in one, that it wasn’t just a bunch of farmers watching I-65 run through their front yards thinking they’ve got it so good.

Still, the thing that held the most significant sway over me, a lifetime racing fan, was the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I went three times between 2008 and 2014, but it was never for the 500, which had long felt like a diminished prospect in the wake of the CART/IRL split but remained, in any language on Earth, the Indianapolis 500. So, when the question came up as a possible option for my 40th birthday care of an Indiana native who’d also never experienced this regional rite of passage, I started as a firm maybe. Amid the most arduous stretch of my work year, though, I needed to give myself a mental break. Who was I kidding? Of course I eventually said yes.

– – –

Something you can’t realize about Indianapolis Motor Speedway until you get there is simply how big it is. Robert Shwartzman did 232 mph laps to capture pole and it was still taking him more than 38 seconds to get around the place. It’s not just the length of the 2.5-mile track, either; it’s also how many people come to bear witness to history. The 500 is the world’s largest single-day sporting event. At full capacity, IMS holds something like 350,000 people. It is the second largest city in Indiana after the rest of Indianapolis on race day. And for the 109th running this year, perhaps due in part to the cloudier weather and cooler temperatures, the grandstands were maxed out.

So were the bathrooms. I’d started out the morning before dawn, waking at 5am to a small breakfast with live French Open coverage and checking out of the hotel by 6 to get to the track and find a decent parking spot. Even five hours before the race, lots were more than half full and the line to get into one stretched more than a mile long. Once settled, though, we polished off a few mimosas before making our way to a pre-race front yard party with one of Megan’s cousins and a host of strangers congregated at some other, unaffiliated stranger’s house a block away from the track. At least seven planes flew banners advertising a mix of Mountain Dew and abortion pills you could purchase by mail. Bathrooms weren’t evident and we weren’t planning to stay long, so I figured I’d just hold it until we got to the speedway and got settled in our seats.

That was a mistake. Getting in was exhausting enough, but even once we’d actually found our correct spots, returning to the bathroom and seeing the line was enough for me to reject the whole premise. I elected to wait out the race on a filled bladder.

That, it turns out, was not a mistake. Through a rain delay, low-flying Blackhawk helicopters, the Purdue marching band and a rousing rendition of “Back Home Again in Indiana” as sung by the guy who also apparently does Chicago Blackhawks anthems, through the tentative pace laps and first quarter of the race, where crashes seemed to happen constantly on the other side of the track, I held out. The Snake Pit, where hundreds of people danced to Oliver Heldens beat drops while Roger Penske solemnly asked us to salute the troops, blew fire and smoke in the infield. The wind kept me alert. The race finally found its rhythm about halfway through. With the benefit of great seats in Turn 4, you could see the cars — which are surprisingly quiet in the hybrid era, to the point that I didn’t end up using earplugs even though we brought some — coming into Turn 3, negotiating the short chute, then exiting down the long, long front straight (or into the pits) before diving into Turn 1 again. This should go without saying: Binoculars helped.

In the end, Alex Palou’s historic first win (but not, I suspect, his last) was a satisfying yet expected result given his dominance this year. The crowd, mostly pro-Pato O’Ward and Conor Daly in my immediate vicinity, applauded earnestly at its conclusion; Palou is not yet a villain in the mold of Josef Newgarden. The sun cracked the clouds as the milk poured. We found a commemorative program and returned to the front yard to congregate with the cousin’s squad. I found a bathroom and ate a fresh-grilled hot dog. For anyone else considering our three-hour return trip, this would’ve sufficed for a memorable 40th birthday story. It would’ve been enough.

It also would’ve left something on the table.

– – –

You couldn’t say the New York Knicks’ season came as any great surprise. The overall contours were familiar: Tom Thibodeau’s increasingly thin combover and perpetually crossed arms a betrayal of his frayed New York state of mind helming the con; Karl-Anthony Towns absorbing the blows in place of Julius Randle down center; Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges wandering the perimeter with intermittent effectiveness; Jalen Brunson clutch-dropping buckets at just the moment any reasonable observer would’ve switched stations to see what else was on. Fans had seen this before. Anyone who’s also rooted for the Garden-sharing Rangers in recent years would’ve been doubly steeled against a positive outcome when it came time for the playoffs — even if the Knicks did somehow manage to defeat a surprisingly, pleasingly resurgent Detroit and did manage to pull something out against the Celtics and did manage to find a way around a rolling Cleveland, there was still whatever came out of the West. The team won 51 games. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was never gonna lose sleep over Deuce McBride.

Still, there they were in late May with gas in the tank having unexpectedly survived a depleted Boston. What they had before them now was another surprising late-season juggernaut: The Indiana Pacers had won 15 of their last 19 regular season games. Irrespective of Damian Lillard’s Achilles, they’d put the Milwaukee Bucks to bed. They threw the Cavaliers conclusively akimbo and came into MSG May 21st believing in themselves, the most dangerous kind of team to face in any playoff series. “Lucky Knicks,” one might say both sincerely and sarcastically.

Four days later, the writing was on the wall that anyone who’d been caught up in the Lakers or the Warriors all season, or hell, anyone who’d felt the inevitable tug toward heavy favorites like Cleveland and OKC, had vastly underestimated how lethal Indiana could look. Up two games on the Knicks — it really should’ve been tied, but ball still don’t lie after all these years — going into Gainbridge Fieldhouse for Game 3, the mood in the group chat was grim. A gentlemen’s sweep felt generous; the gas in the tank was gone.

The thing about this current iteration of the Knicks, though, is that you really can’t look away until the clock is out; even games that feel inevitable somehow aren’t. They truly embody Why We Watch … so after they lost Game 1, I texted my youngest, not younger, brother in New York to get an idea of how much tickets were going for ahead of Game 2 at MSG. I wanted to know this because regardless of the outcome, there would have to be a Game 3. In Indianapolis. The first Sunday in 11 years that I would also be there.

He returned a figure that would get him in the building. I looked up tickets for Game 3 and bought two for the same price.

– – –

A quick look at the map will show you Indianapolis Motor Speedway is about six miles from Gainbridge Fieldhouse. On a good day with no traffic, it’s about 20 minutes into downtown; on the literal worst day with the second largest city in Indiana attempting to dissipate all at once, hours is a generous guess. There is no predictive AI to comprehend the journey.

Waiting an hour with a bathroom, a fresh-grilled hot dog and a beer to pass the time between chats was, it turns out, wildly insufficient for the trip we’d have to make to see the second of North America’s two biggest sporting events that day. When we returned to the car, I asked a neighbor how long they’d been sitting there in line waiting to get out of the lot. “I’ve been trying to figure that out myself,” he replied, sober enough to take seriously. That was enough to convince me it was time for more decisive action. We walked in the general direction of downtown plotting alternative transportation routes. Ubers and Lyfts would be useless. We needed something else.

That a rickshaw sat waiting there amid the post-race throngs felt too serendipitous to be true, but sure enough, Andreij, who I suspect was Bulgarian, was more than happy to blast “Born to Run” at top volume as he pedaled the length of the front straight to get us away from the scores of cars clawing toward interstate. A $50 negotiation of people and bollards later, we were at the south end of the speedway nearer to a pickup location for whichever Uber driver was willing to take a chance on us. I’m not overstating it when I say we could not have had a better driver in that moment than Ashley — in another moment of manifestation, we’d been gifted a woman who’d grown up within earshot of the speedway and knew every backstreet the city had to offer. “What time does the game start? 7? Oh, we’ll get you there.” It was 6:45. I trusted the process.

Rightly so. Not only did we miss just three minutes of actual game time, but we’d climbed to our seats in the very last row before the rafters just as the Knicks were giving up an early lead. The place was awash in yellow, which struck me as even more militaristic than the Thunder’s alternating blue/white crowds; Pacers management had laid out “Vroom Baby” T-shirts for those in attendance. Of the 17,274 people present, only a smattering sported Knicks jerseys or neutral colors. There was no way to tell how many were attempting the racers n’ Pacers.

I’m a little biased, but Game 3 of the 2025 Eastern Conference Finals is the best NBA game I’ve ever seen in person. The building is positively electric as Indiana pulls out a lead of 20 late in the first half. I see how smooth with it Tyrese Haliburton can be, how much TJ McConnell can pester with his pull-up jumpers, how Pascal Siakam acts as the glue, how annoying Aaron Nesmith is when it’s going right for him. It’s a vice grip, they’re a bumblebee flurry everywhere on the floor … so I choose that moment to send my most prophetic text of the year:

What happens next does not happen in a blur or quick succession. We re-up on beers for halftime as some German guy gets his trained dog to do a bunch of balancing stunts (this is what network halftime shows rob you of); Alex Palou comes out to more applause, waving with the winner’s wreath around him; I turn to Megan as the third quarter starts and observe that if the Knicks are down 10 at the end of the quarter, there’s still a chance; the Pacers look good and then, slowly, excruciatingly, less good as the Knicks make every shot feel like climbing Mount Everest, but they do keep making them; the Knicks are down exactly 10 at the end of the third; with renewed interest in the game, they suck the air out the building by leading again in the fourth; edging just out of reach as the clock runs out, somehow, they win. No one in the building can believe it except, maybe, the men wearing Knicks jerseys on the floor. Well, and that smattering of veteran Knicks fans.

I learned later that with the loss, Indiana dropped to 0-4 all-time when playing the same day the Indy 500 is run, with two of those losses to the Knicks. But what was unprecedented about this game was me: The 2024-25 New York Knicks weren’t just 1-0 when I was in attendance, they’re also the only Knicks team in history I’ve seen play. Maybe I manifested too much at once, but you can’t put a price on pulling off that experience. You use “YOLO” as shorthand for ordering an Irish car bomb as the bar closes on a weeknight; I use it to make heretofore unimaginable dreams come true. We are not the same.

– – –

The shot of adrenaline I got from the result would’ve been enough to keep me up for most of the three-hour drive back, but in a day flush with moments to remember, there’s one last scene I’ll never forget.

We’re walking the concourse heading down toward a live fit check with the NBA on TNT crew as Gainbridge Fieldhouse security tries to usher us to the exits when, unprovoked, a dude walking in front of us starts singing Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York.” And I don’t just mean singing — this guy is shamelessly belting it in the slowest, most inebriated imitation of Old Blue Eyes imaginable. His girlfriend pulls out a camera and starts to film as we slow down, hold back, savor it a little. He’s hitting the notes and knows every word, his voice reverberating both ways down the concourse. I can’t help but laugh out loud, sympathetic to the idea that in that moment, there’s nothing I’d want to hear less as an Indiana Pacers fan than “Your small town blues, they’re melting away” at top volume. God, what an obnoxious asshole, I think. Please don’t stop.

If I’m being real, that was probably also the moment I let the 2024-25 Knicks go. It couldn’t get better. Work obligations startle you up the morning after, 22 hours awake takes its toll, life crashes back into view, gravity regains hold eventually. The Pacers were too tenacious not to win this series, scare the Thunder and lose the Finals in a thrilling last gasp of contemporary basketball. But as the calendar hung at the precipice of Memorial Day proper, exhaustion and exhilaration blurred in liminal glory. We left nothing on the table. Yes, finally: We smiled.