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Freddy Sullivan figures he will make the 5:32 train out of Penn Station tonight, his usual ride home. The shame is that he would give his left arm to be able to take a later train back to the Valley Stream station, the 10:28 if he’s tired, the 10:52 if he wants to quaff a postgame beer or two first, down the street at Mustang Sally’s.
“Home by 11:30,” Sullivan said, “in bed by midnight. Up at 6:30, grab the papers with my bagel and my coffee on the 7:45 train, read about the game. That’s what nights when I have tickets are like for me; I still feel like I’m 15, going to the city for the first time.”
Sullivan sighed.
“Would have been a hell of a night,” he said. “A hell of a night. Knicks-Heat? Are you kidding?”
He knew this night was coming. Everyone in the New York basketball community knew. When Sullivan’s cousin called months ago, said he could get his hands on tickets to the opener, he did allow himself the reflex of excitement for a moment. And then handed it over to something else: resignation, melancholy.
A few weeks ago, NBA commissioner David Stern made official what everyone hoping to be at the Garden tonight for the Knicks and the Heat had long assumed. The sign they should put on the Seventh Avenue marquee — or, better, on the front door — could offer a simple, sad message:
Gym closed.
Indefinitely.
“Just when I was ready to live and die with them again, instead of just dying,” Sullivan said. “Maybe it’s better I just devote all that energy to the Giants, anyway. They could use it, the schedule they got coming up.”
Most of the laments attached to the NBA lockout have been quiet. There are a lot of basketball fans, even devoted ones, who think 82 games are too many anyway. There are a lot of basketball fans, even devoted ones, who can’t stomach the spin that bleeds from labor meetings. And there are a lot of basketball fans, even devoted ones, who have buried themselves in other pursuits — pro football, college football, baseball’s postseason, books, TV, movies — to insulate themselves from the reality of a vanished league.
It’s easy to do, if you want to keep it out of your mind.
Just not so easy starting tonight. Tonight it’s all real. Tonight the NBA season starts to disappear bit by bit, like pieces removed from a jigsaw puzzle .
Today there should be a Heat shootaround somewhere in the city, probably at the Garden, with dozens of reporters surrounding LeBron James and Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, firing the first volleys at them as they start Year 2 of the most polarizing quest in sports.
Tonight, just past 6, Mike D’Antoni — coaching for his Knicks career now, all his cards on the table — should be blinking away the first klieg lights of the season, answering Tina Cervasio’s questions for MSG Network, then the rest of a basketball-hungry press horde’s.
Then, just past 7:35, the lights should be dimmed, and the buzz should be up, and Celebrity Row should be filled — and with heavyweights, too — and Mike Walczewski should be bellowing into a microphone, “Welcome to Madison Square Garden, the world’s most famous arena!” and on TV Mike Breen and Clyde Frazier should be welcoming us to a new basketball adventure, and Spiro Dedes and Johnny Hoops should be doing exactly the same on the radio.
And right at 7:40 Amare Stoudemire and Bosh should be leaping toward the pinwheel roof, and Carmelo Anthony should be running hard toward the basket, and …
And none of it will happen, except in the memory and imagination of those who want more than anything to be there, not on an early train back to Nassau or Westchester or Jersey, stuck in traffic on the West Side Highway or the L.I.E.
“You think they’ll be back at all this year?” Freddy Sullivan asked.
You keep thinking so, hoping so, but in a basketball city, maybe that’s just optimism, or delusion. So the Heat won’t be here tonight. Kevin Durant and Oklahoma City won’t be here next Monday. Nothing, for now, until the Bucks on Dec. 2. If then. If ever.
Gym closed. Indefinitely.