The Best Thing My Parents Gave Me (Wasn't a Thing)

There's a particular feeling at the bottom of the ninth — two outs, bases loaded, the whole stadium holding its breath — where your body stops belonging to you and becomes part of something bigger. I grew up on that feeling. Queens girl, Italian family, sports as the love language nobody had to translate.

I was in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium for the three-peat: '98, '99, 2000. My mom, my dad, my brother, all of us crammed into those seats like it was the most natural place in the world to be. Nobody needed to explain why it mattered. It just did, the way Sunday sauce and big goodbyes did.

So when the Knicks won their first championship in 53 years last week and New York lost its mind in the streets, I felt it even from Long Island. A grief specialist named Barri Leiner Grant wrote about it afterward, calling it "collective effervescence" — the electricity that runs through a crowd when everyone is hoping for the same thing at the same time. Strangers becoming a we.

I was a softball player, a cheerleader, and a musical theater kid in high school, and what I remember most isn't the wins. It's the feeling of being on a team, of something mattering to a whole group of people at once. My son plays baseball now. My daughter swims. I am, it turns out, exactly the kind of parent who loses her mind from the sidelines (respectfully, of course).

I didn't fully understand what my parents were giving me in those bleachers. I just thought we were watching baseball.