Efren Andaluz couldn’t sleep.
It was late one Friday last month, and Mr. Andaluz had just watched the Knicks take a two-game lead in the N.B.A. finals. As he tossed and turned in bed, images of large brick walls fluttered through his mind.
The next morning, he hopped in his car and began weaving his way around Manhattan, driven by a singular mission: finding a suitable spot to paint a large-scale mural of Jalen Brunson, the Knicks’ star point guard.
“For me, it was important,” said Mr. Andaluz, 39, a street artist who grew up in Queens and now lives on Long Island. “This is New York, and I put on for my city, especially if there’s a lot of energy around.”
That energy grew only more infectious as the Knicks pushed on to clinch their first league title in 53 years. And the same sense of shared joy that summoned New Yorkers into the streets to celebrate was compelling artists like Mr. Andaluz to memorialize the feeling with spray cans and brushes.
Less than a month later, much of the sports world has moved on. The streets have been cleared of confetti. But a gallery’s worth of basketball-inspired murals remain splashed on the walls of the city.
“It felt like a momentous occasion because everyone was feeling the same thing,” said Scott Zimmerman, 41, a street artist from Queens who painted a mural of Mr. Brunson outside the Ridge Hotel on the Lower East Side. “Everyone in the city wearing Knicks memorabilia, every artist painting murals, they were all weaving the fabric of the moment.”
The euphoria of any sports championship can feel jarringly short-lived. An off-season brings its own story lines. Within a few months, there arrives a new season, and a few more after that, a new champion.
Emerging everywhere, too, are reminders that these fairy tales actually unfurl inside a cold, corporate environment. Just this week, Mitchell Robinson, a fleet-footed, country-music-loving big man beloved by Knicks fans, unceremoniously ended his long tenure in New York by signing with — of all teams — the Boston Celtics.
Devine Kaysuane, 34, an artist and longtime Knicks fan from East Harlem, watched the player’s departure with some melancholy. But he felt some satisfaction, too, that he was able to have painted a mural on 30th Street in Manhattan depicting Mr. Robinson dunking over an opponent in one of the more electrifying moments of the team’s championship run.
“This is how I can keep that moment alive,” said Mr. Kaysuane, who also painted a mural of Mr. Brunson. “We’re documenting history, for real.”
The life span of any piece of street art, of course, can never be guaranteed. But Mr. Kaysuane and the other artists expressed hope that their chosen subject matter might afford them some grace and protection in the city.
Mr. Andaluz, after that night of insomnia, spent hours driving around the city before spotting a ragged but promising wall outside of a bar on the Lower East Side. He had an image in mind — Mr. Brunson with his arm outstretched, wearing the radiant glove of Thanos, a Marvel Comics supervillain — and was ready to paint.
Before he did, the owner of the bar warned him that the wall was often tagged by heedless graffiti writers, and that any mural on there might not last very long. But Mr. Andaluz shrugged him off.
“It’s a Brunson mural,” he said. “He’s the king of the city. If someone tags over it, they’re going to get beat up.”
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