Here’s a question: Does knowing a bad call went against your team — knowing, for sure, that you got screwed — make you feel better? Does that information enhance your life? Does it bring you any sort of peace?

On Sunday afternoon, the New York Knicks won game four of their endlessly entertaining, ’90s-sharp-elbows throwback series over the Detroit Pistons, 94–93. They won because Jalen Brunson recovered from an injured ankle to have a brilliant fourth quarter, because Karl-Anthony Towns hit an unfathomable step-back 3-pointer (which sent Spike Lee, who is 68 years old, into apoplexy), and because Pistons star Cade Cunningham missed a shot with three seconds left that would have handed the game to Detroit.

But those are basketball reasons, which is to say that they are boring. These reasons do not provide the reliable dopamine and endorphin hits that aggrievement provides, and do not feed into the increasingly default American sensation that larger forces have conspired against us to take away something we want. Thus, no one focuses on basketball reasons. They focus on a bad call.

The last play of the Knicks game involved the Pistons’ Tim Hardaway Jr. (a former Knick) shooting a 3-pointer at the buzzer and appearing to be fouled by Josh Hart. But the referees did not call anything, time expired, and the Knicks won. Knicks fans got a 3–1 series lead and everyone else got to be performatively angry. That anger, as always, was directed at the referees, who were alternately (a) trying to engineer a victory for the big-market Knicks; (b) being paid off by gamblers; (c) incompetent; (d) just plain assholes. We want to feel like something has been taken from us. But, just as much, we want someone to scream at it about — someone to blame.

Hart did appear to foul Hardaway on the play. (The NBA, in its almost existentially pointless “two-minute report,” agreed afterward.) So there: We have proof that the Pistons lost because a call that should have been made wasn’t.........

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