Forty minutes stand between Liberty and NYC basketball finally returning to glory

You’re setting yourself up for a lot of trouble if you say that New York has gone on a title-free slide from the moment the Giants walked off the field at Lucas Oil Stadium 21-17 winners over the Patriots on Feb. 5, 2012.

There is a fair reason for this. Even if you qualify the parameters as “zero championships in the four major sports,” you are just begging to be swatted like a fly by fans of soccer, who would retort, with cause: “Four major sports according to whom?”

Thus it is right and it is fair to remember that NYCFC won the MLS championship in 2021, and that Gothan FC is the reigning champion in the National Women’s Soccer League, with a fair shot at repeating this year at 15-4-5.

So perhaps it’s not quite true that Friday night at Minneapolis’ Target Center, the Liberty have a chance to restore New York to a long-abandoned championship pedigree as they attempt to close out the Lynx in Game 4 of the WNBA Finals.

But this much is undisputed and indisputable:

If the Liberty can do that, they will bring a professional basketball championship back to New York City for the first time in 18,790 days. That was Game 5, at the old Fabulous Forum in LA: Knicks 102, Lakers 93. Bill Bradley leapt into Willis Reed’s arms at the buzzer, and the Knicks flew home with New York’s second pro hoops banner.

It has been gathering dust ever since.

It is time, high time, for a new one.

“There hasn’t been a basketball championship there in over 50 years,” says Breanna Stewart, whose free-agent signing from the Storm in February 2023 began the two-season quest that now sits 40 minutes on the other side of one more victory.

“Just the way that the city has kind of embraced us, and I think really from the Liberty and WNBA perspective, being in Manhattan and going to Brooklyn, being New York’s team, it would just be an incredible moment for sports.”

It would be. And it figures that New York might be the place where an historic year of women’s basketball plays out its final act. Caitlin Clark’s magnificence pushed the college game to an apex that just a few years ago would have seemed impossible, and her rookie season with the Indiana Fever filled arenas and lit up TV ratings.

Then the women’s Olympic team won its eighth straight gold medal in Paris, storming through that tournament before edging host France by a point in the finals.

And now the Liberty, born when the league was born in 1997, can bring basketball brilliance back to the city, back to The City Game, back to a place that takes basketball every bit as seriously as any other hoops haven you can name.

“The people of New York don’t let you stop thinking about it,” says Jonquel Jones. “Like, every time you’re walking around or doing something, they’re always talking: ‘OK, we gotta go through one more game and then we got the Aces.’ ‘Oh we’re in the championship now.’ You know what I’m saying? It’s constant. You can’t get away from it.”

You can’t. Not now. Not this close. For all the disappointment generated by the Game 1 collapse, the Game 3 comeback, capped by Sabrina Ionescu’s game-winning dagger, has allowed that memory to vaporize in a hazy mist of glee.

Now all it takes is one more win. It’s a crowded dance card around New York these days, keeping up with the latest football calamities, waiting on the Knicks to trace the very same kind of pathway the Liberty already have to destiny’s doorstep, the Yankees and the Mets keeping everyone on edge, as they both try to finagle their way to the Canyon of Heroes.

The Liberty can beat all of them there. They can restore New York to basketball preeminence for the first time in 18,790 days, join the soccer teams as champions. It’s time. It’s high time.