CNN Sports
I’ve never been much of a basketball fan. But like millions of other New Yorkers and people with their hearts in this great city, I got caught up in the NBA finals and was thrilled with the Knicks victory. And I learned something, confirmed something I already knew. Deadlines are real and often immutable. But until you reach them, anything is possible. Even if there are just split seconds left.
As a Yankees fan since I was a little kid, I already knew this. One of the best things about the Yankees is the way they win games in which they’re trailing in the ninth inning. (Yogi Berra: "It ain’t over till it’s over.") But baseball, wonderful as it is, is a chess game, slow motion most of the time, slow motion compared to the high-octane rush of basketball, and the Knicks demonstrated that point incandescently in the last two games of the NBA playoffs.
The Spurs were leading by sizeable margins at halftime and beyond. The Knicks didn't start their juggernaut until well into the 4th quarter. And the Spurs didn’t know what hit them — twice. In the fourth and fifth games, once the Knicks started scoring, it was almost as if the Spurs were playing a different game, a different kind of basketball, or the same game in a different dimension.
But the truth is that what the Knicks did is closer to the lives we all live. Deadlines have meaning. We ignore them at our peril, small and large. But until we reach them, anything is possible. While there’s life in a game, there’s hope. While there’s life, there’s hope. That’s a very important lesson, I think, for everyone.
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