Fatigue had caught up to Jalen Brunson. For two grueling months of playoff basketball, he had seemed immune to it, growing stronger in the game’s last minutes just as his opponents would begin to fade. The pattern repeated itself throughout the NBA Finals, when the youthful San Antonio Spurs and their sinewy phenom Victor Wembanyama wilted in the fourth quarter, bricking free throws and committing mystifying turnovers. Brunson and his teammates, however, consistently rallied, turning deficits into leads, and leads into wins, including a stunning 29-point comeback in game four. The most concise explanation for how the New York Knicks won their first title in more than a half-century is that they simply outlasted everyone else.

On his fourth day as an NBA champion, however, Brunson’s voice bore the raspiness of a man running on fumes, his responses clipped and halting. The night before, he had planned on staying up to watch Argentina’s opening match in the World Cup but dozed off, waking up only after Lionel Messi had completed a vintage hat trick. “I was pissed,” he told me as we spoke in a hotel suite overlooking Central Park.

Brunson had just come from CBS, where he and his father, Knicks assistant coach Rick Brunson, sat for an interview with Gayle King and Nate Burleson — another stop in a post-title media tour that stretched from daytime television to late night. By then, Brunson had already appeared alongside his fellow Knicks starters on Good Morning America, Today, and the Tonight Show and also made solo appearances on The View and First Take. That evening, he and Josh Hart were expected in the Bronx to toss the first pitch at a Yankees game. A friend’s wedding in New Jersey was on tap for that weekend. And in between, Brunson and the Knicks would be cheered on by some 2 million fans at a ticker-tape parade that culminated in Mayor Zohran Mamdani giving each player a key to the city.

On a scale that begins with OG Anunoby, the reserved hero behind that last-second tip-in in game four, and ends with Karl-Anthony Towns, who seems destined for a career in broadcasting, Brunson falls somewhere in the middle. He hosts a podcast with Hart and Matt Hillman, The Roommates Show, yet remains fairly guarded in media appearances. He is cerebral without being self-serious, funny without trying too hard to be, and, every now and then, manages to produce a line that lingers. “You’re allowed to think about the worst possible scenario,” Brunson said after the Knicks’ win in game four, “but you gotta go out there and do something about it.”

The Knicks entered this season with their loftiest expectations since the ’90s, as owner James Dolan made it clear that a Finals appearance was a minimum requirement. They showed promise early on by winning the NBA Cup, the league’s in-season tournament, and with 53 regular-season victories, they were considered a top contender to emerge from the NBA’s Eastern Conference. Still, the playoffs were widely viewed as a two-horse race between the Spurs and the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder, a pair of Western Conference juggernauts that each won more than 60 games. But something shifted in the first round, when the Atlanta Hawks took a 2-1 series lead over the Knicks. “I don’t think it was a situation where we were nervous,” Brunson told me. “I think it was just a wake-up call like, ‘This team is good. We can’t overlook them. We know that we need to play better. How can we do that?’ And then as a group, we realized that our attention to detail wasn’t where it needed to be. So did we flip a switch or did we just kind of refocus? I don’t really know, but whatever we did, it worked.” The Knicks comfortably won the remaining games in the series, including a 51-point blowout in the decider, and did not lose again until game three of the NBA Finals, when Donald Trump showed up at Madison Square Garden.

By the time they entered the Finals, the Knicks dominated the conversation in the city and drove the social life of its inhabitants. A playoff game, for both die-hard and bandwagon fans, became appointment viewing, a reason to gather with friends at teeming bars and makeshift watch parties — and to let the children stay up past their bedtime. It was a rolling spectacle that everyone could talk about at the office or gym, in an Uber or on the subway. While New York has two NBA franchises, the Brooklyn Nets — who relocated from New Jersey nearly 15 years ago — could never challenge the Knicks’ supremacy. There is no split in allegiances as there are in other parts of the city’s sports landscape, where Mets fans revel in the Yankees’ misfortune and vice versa. The Knicks, for a few thrilling weeks, reminded everyone that they are New York’s favorite team with all five boroughs behind them.

Brunson was still processing everything the morning I met him at the Mandarin Oriental. The championship hadn’t fully sunk in yet, he said, and he suspected it wouldn’t until he had some remove from all the confetti and Champagne and “Knicks in Five” chants. “I haven’t internalized it yet,” Brunson told me. “But I know that down the line, I’ll feel the effects of it.” After the final buzzer sounded for game five in San Antonio, his usual stone face was cracked with streaks of tears. And there had been moments of reflection in the days that followed, like the long stretches of silence in the car with his wife, Ali Marks Brunson, the two staring at each other in elated disbelief. “I haven’t been as emotional,” he said. “I think the further I get away from it, the more I’ll realize what happened.”

What happened was a citywide exorcism after more than 50 years of falling short, an opportunity for New Yorkers to spill into the streets. It was also vindication: for the Knicks, who saw Brunson as a franchise cornerstone when few others did; for his father, who pushed him relentlessly as a child and hasn’t stopped since; and for Brunson, who could permanently silence the critics. “This completely changes everyone’s opinion of him going forward,” Ali told me six days later. “If you’re going to talk about Jalen, you’re going to have to mention that he was a Finals MVP, that he was a champion.”

Forty-three floors below, Columbus Circle hummed with commuters still basking in the victory, decked out in Knicks gear, adults who might transform into giddy children if they caught a glimpse of Brunson — to say nothing of the actual youth of New York, for whom he is an icon. The day we spoke, Kim Gordon wore his jersey on The Tonight Show, while a sea of No. 11’s lined the parade route the next morning in lower Manhattan. Brunson acknowledges things will “be different” but is perhaps understating the new heights of his fame. He prides himself on being a normal guy; when he says “I don’t like to........

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