I was one of millions of people who died multiple times during Wednesday night's NBA Finals game. And I was among the millions who were reborn, multiple times, during that same game.

Much has been written about the power of sports, and I may not be adding anything new to the conversation. That's all right. Sometimes it is enough to join the chorus in effervescent awe. But like millions of others, I cannot help finding deep metaphor in being part of the Knicks family during these times of horror.

Wednesday's game broke records, first in the wrong direction. Shockingly early in the night, the Knicks fell behind by 29 points, on their way to the largest deficit ever overcome in NBA Finals history. They were down 27 at halftime; until this series, no team had rallied from more than 24 points in a Finals game, a mark set by the 2008 Celtics against the Lakers. The Spurs were shooting the lights out of Madison Square Garden, and their superstar seemed unstoppable. At one point, after absorbing a hard foul, he rose from the floor, pointed to his temple, and taunted: I'm in your head.

In my head, I felt nothing but devastation.

Fromm was right that art captures human experience better than abstraction ever could, and the art of basketball, through the brilliance of these Knicks, captures hope better than any essay I could write, including this one.

There is so much to be devastated about in this world. President Donald Trump is making a mockery of our dream of a democracy and of our collective efforts to build a more just world, taking our taxpayer money to wage a war (which he calls flippantly an excursion) on Iran that includes attacks on civilian infrastructure. He has torn into the White House itself, a building whose restrained architecture once symbolized a leadership that refused the grandiosity of false emperors. And this Sunday, on his 80th birthday, he is converting its South Lawn into a $60 million carnival of toxic masculinity: a cage-fighting spectacle staged to soothe an unbelievably fragile ego, men bashing into one another beneath the windows of the people's house.

This is only scratching the surface. If the Spurs were truly in our heads, the heads of so many of us in the United States and around the world, they would find us grappling to locate our way back to hope during this time of polycrises.

And yet, somehow, that is exactly what is happening. It has nothing to do with chest-thumping enactments of domination. Nor does it have anything to do with positive thinking, manifestation, or any other individualizing nonsense. The Knicks, friends, are showing us something about how communities find their way out of despair, and maybe even out of fascism.

The long arc toward justice is indeed long. It can look devastating. Unprecedented. It can break new records in how low it sinks. There might be a step toward the championship, and then suddenly the gap grows wider than it has ever been.

But Jalen Brunson and his teammates did not simply believe. They did not repeat mantras. They did not lash out with aggression because they were threatened and humiliated. They kept working. Possession by possession. A 13-0 run to claw the lead under 20. Brunson answering basket after basket, he would finish with 36 points, while OG Anunoby added 33 of his own.

Mariame Kaba, the brilliant abolitionist organizer and author, teaches us that hope is a discipline. Not a feeling that visits us when conditions improve, but a practice we commit to precisely when they don't. Half a century........

© Common Dreams