For basketball fans, the Greg Marius Court at Holcombe Rucker Park in Harlem is sacred ground where professional legends and amateur streetballers come out in the summertime to put on a show for packed crowds.
There were neither pros nor crowds at the park on Friday. However, basketball fans — many of them Knicks loyalists from near and far — trickled onto the court for pickup games while debating the prospect of the team winning its first championship in 53 years.
The Knicks lead the San Antonio Spurs, three games to one, in the N.B.A. finals, with a performance in the best-of-seven series that has electrified the city. While the energy was not as palpable on a steamy Friday at Rucker Park, some of it carried onto the court, where Chris Salorio, 52, played shirtless with three other men in the unrelenting sun.
Mr. Salorio, an electrician visiting from California for a bowling tournament, said he hoped the Knicks could seal the deal when the teams meet again on Saturday night in Game 5. He said he grew up on Long Island watching greats like Patrick Ewing and Charles Oakley play for the Knicks, and he thought the team now led by Jalen Brunson, the Knicks’ All-Star guard, deserved to win.
“They haven’t been relevant for a long time,” he said. “It would give the city something to be proud of, some self-esteem.”
Jay Smith, 40, an electrician, said the Knicks needed to win on Saturday if they were to take the championship at all. Standing next to him in front of the fence enclosing the court, Tyriek Jones, a Boston Celtics fan, wished the worst for the Knicks.
Mr. Smith said the team needed to exact revenge on behalf of the city for its loss to the Spurs in the finals in 1999.
“They stole it from us,” he said. “We need it. Or we’re going to burn New York down.”
(He clarified that he was joking. He placed a bet on the game and doesn’t want to get beat up by the rowdy crowds, he added.)
Janell Moore, a radio host from Richmond, Va., had been thrown into the thick of the frenzy of Game 4 when she arrived in Manhattan on Wednesday night to celebrate her birthday. She had no idea of the chaos that awaited her when she got off the bus in Midtown.
“I arrived right when they won,” she said. “So I was right in the mosh pit.”
A lifelong fascination with New York led her to start rooting for the Knicks while she was growing up in Germany. She strode onto the court on Friday with a basketball under her arm and a tie-dyed Knicks shirt that she’d found slung over her shoulder. A stranger had told her that she must visit the court in Upper Manhattan, so she did.
After a while, she was swept into a game with a group of male tourists for whom the Knicks were not front-of-mind.
It was the World Cup, not the N.B.A. finals, that drew the group from Buenos Aires to the city. They found the park after one of them, Esteban Citara, 49, a restaurateur, asked ChatGPT for the most famous place to play basketball in Harlem.
The group had never played before, he said. Nonetheless, they pulled in Ms. Moore. There was much sneaker-squeaking, double-dribbling and buckets made and missed. After a quick game of three-on-three, the men walked off the court huffing, sweaty and giddy over their side quest. Then, they left to find food.
The court had cleared when Amari, 12, and Aang, 14, two middle school students, arrived to throw up some shots. They said they were excited to see the Knicks reach for a championship in their “era,” as Aang called it.
“It’s historic,” Aang said. Amari added, “Knicks in five.”
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