Doug Bertinelli and Pat Hannafin met in 1969 as middle-schoolers and basketball teammates for Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic Church on Staten Island.
Their first season together, they won a championship.
The next year, they waited overnight outside Madison Square Garden to buy tickets to watch the Knicks win theirs.
By 1973, Mr. Bertinelli and Mr. Hannafin were high school seniors and best friends. They went back to the Garden, with the help of Mr. Bertinelli’s earnings as a part-time grocery cashier and stock boy, to watch the Knicks win a second title.
With a bedsheet and a magic marker, Mr. Hannafin made a banner for the two to carry at a celebration in Manhattan.
As the Knicks’ fortune faded, so did Mr. Hannafin’s banner, which was stowed away in his attic.
Still, the two never stopped talking about the team.
And on Thursday, the lifelong friends returned to a Knicks championship celebration — this time a ticker-tape parade — as fans of the winning team once again, with the bedsheet to prove it.
It was a long way coming for Mr. Bertinelli, 71, and Mr. Hannafin, 70, who had both retired from the New York City Sanitation Department and had children in the generation between Knicks championships.
Over the years, Mr. Hannafin had become a New York sports fanatic, something of a prolific sign-holder at games, and a self-described hoarder of memorabilia.
Mr. Bertinelli wasn’t surprised that Mr. Hannafin kept the banner for more than five decades.
And Mr. Bertinelli, who now lives in Barnegat, N.J., didn’t mind the hour-plus drive to Mr. Hannafin’s house on Staten Island to watch the Knicks lose Game 3.
“It was like old times,” Mr. Bertinelli said. “Even though they lost, we ordered pizza.”
The two had gone to St. Peter’s Boys High School on Staten Island.
They wound up with jobs at different garages with the Sanitation Department. Mr. Hannafin worked the early-morning shift in Manhattan, while Mr. Bertinelli became a supervisor on Staten Island.
They had their first daughters three days apart.
“On days Pat would come to work on Staten Island, I’d tell the people setting up, ‘Put him with me,’” Mr. Bertinelli said. “We’d do a route.”
Mr. Hannafin never got a cellphone.
“He’s had the same house phone,” Mr. Bertinelli said. “So I know the number by heart.”
On Thursday, they took the Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan together, just like they had as teenagers, when tickets to the finals still felt affordable and were sold as strips for several games.
“Wiping the dust off that banner, that was the highlight,” Mr. Hannafin said. Mr. Bertinelli gladly drove back to Staten Island to take Mr. Hannafin to the parade.
They said the celebration was bigger this time around.
“We can’t see each other that often now,” Mr. Hannafin said of the distance between their homes. “But 53 years later, we’re still attached to the Knicks.”
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