The extremely welcome, slightly jarring return of sports crowds

Fans, it turns out, are what give games life, shape, vigor, context … soul. The 15,000 bonkers fans at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night for the Knicks’ first playoff game in eight years transformed the contest from a normal first-round playoff game into a pulsating expression of desperate fans’ pent-up yearning. There were moments, particularly after RJ Barrett’s third-quarter dunk, when the noise was so loud and immediate and human that it felt like the crowd was carrying you a few feet above the ground, even if you were just watching from your couch. And then Atlanta’s Trae Young, a glorious New York basketball villain the likes of which the city hasn’t seen in 25 years, hit the game-winning basket in the final seconds and pressed his finger to his lips to shush the 15,000 maniacs, most of whom had been screaming “Fuck Trae Young” since the opening tip. Which was a reminder the silence of fans can be just as loud as their cheers, and just as meaningful. At its best, a crowd at a sporting event takes on its own collective personality. That personality can be soaring and elevating, and can raise athletes to previously unseen heights. It can also be nasty, raucous, and rude, sometimes dangerously so. But a crowd often acts as a collective One, and after months of Americans not experiencing much of a collective anything, the return of the crowds is breathtakingly refreshing. Hearing that Knicks crowd scream, cheering a wildly fun team that we’ve all been watching in our own isolations for months now, was discombobulating in its power: It was like being plugged back into an electrical grid.