They’re back in a New York groove.
Reinvigorated and relieved fans poured out onto Seventh Avenue riding high on the Knicks’ wire-to-wire win against the Pacers Thursday night in what the faithful hope is not the final home game of the season.
New York thoroughly cooked the Indiana Pacers in Game 5 Thursday night at the Mecca — winning 111-94 — inspiring fans to believe the series, and the season, is not over yet.
“I’m feeling confident. I feel reborn. At first, I was kind of iffy, but Knicks in seven is alive,” Dan Sindo, 20, who attended the Garden party with his girlfriend, told The Post.
“Amazing. This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment. We haven’t won the series. We got a long way to go, still, but, oh my God,” said Erik Blutinger, 39, an emergency physician at Mount Sinai.
“There’s one team in New York — it is the New York Knicks. I’ve been a Knicks fan since the Ewing era. I was too little. I wasn’t even born when they made the finals in 1970 and ‘73. Now it’s in sight. There’s hope again,” Blutinger, who was celebrating his birthday, said.
Henry Wang, 24, brought a homemade, roughly life-sized, stuffed doll of Pacers point guard Tyrese Haliburton to the crowd outside MSG. Haliburton ripped the heart out of Knicks fans in Game 1 of the series with the faithful returning the favor — and then some — on the effigy.
“[The doll] did not last even seven minutes. He got completely disemboweled. He got jumped. They pantsed him. And then the cops took him, which is classic New York fashion,” Wang revealed to The Post.
Video posted online showed fans savagely letting out all their frustrations on the spineless Haliburton — forming a circle and stomping the plushie to smithereens.
More boisterous hoopheads were letting the trash talk fly and were ready for another party outside the Garden.
“Don’t get me started! We’re getting f–-king lit! The streets are getting teared down! Knicks in seven!” 19-year-old Budders, a UConn student, told The Post.
A man in a Spiderman costume, who identified himself as “Peter Parker,” 22, yelled to The Post, “Knicks in seven! We love the Knicks and f–k Tyrese Haliburton.”
One levelheaded fan pushed back against fans celebrating too vigorously as the Knicks are still on the brink of elimination and trail in the series 3-2.
“Why is everyone celebrating? We still got another game,” one fan shouted while walking out of the arena.
Before the big win, a Knicks fan was handcuffed outside of MSG after he ripped the jersey off of a Pacers fan during an argument in the third quarter, video showed.
Other than that hiccup, there were no pole-climbers or fisticuffs in the dense crowd of revelers.
The Knicks will now travel back to Indiana for Game 6 on Saturday. A win would send the series back to the Mecca for Game 7 on Monday.
The post Knicks fans back to celebrating outside Madison Square Garden after Game 5 win against Pacers: ‘I feel reborn’ appeared first on New York Post.
