Madison Square Garden was quiet and dark Monday. There were no suites to clean, no ice to tend to and smooth, no concession stands to prep, no organ to tune. Next door, at The Theater, there was a Bryson Tiller concert scheduled. Melanie Martinez is up next in the big room, Wednesday and Thursday. Billy Joel will be there Saturday.
The Rangers weren’t there Monday, and so they won’t be there next Monday, either, which is when the Stanley Cup Final would’ve started if Game 1 was going to be in New York instead of Sunrise, Fla. The Knicks won’t be there. The varsity co-tenants won’t be back until October. The Panthers saw to that Saturday night, trimming the Rangers 2-1 in Game 6, ending the most enjoyable hockey season around the Garden in years.
Soon came a recalculation of New York’s recent championship miseries, which has become a regular part of our seasonal aftermath now. Josh Dubow of the Associated Press was kind enough to point out that with the Rangers elimination, the eight teams bearing New York City’s name — Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Knicks, Nets, Rangers, Islanders — have now gone an even 100 combined seasons without winning a championship.
Peter Botte of The New York Post was then clever enough to look at this in an equally dark and depressing way and come up with the number 287 — the total of all those teams’ current championship droughts (for the record: Jets 55; Knicks 51; Nets 47; Isles 41; Mets 37; Rangers 30; Yankees 14; Giants 12).
(And as I am a faithful citizen of New Jersey, I’ll helpfully point out that if you toss the Devils onto those piles both numbers swell to 112 and 308, respectively.)
And, well, what’s pretty clear now is that New York needs what it has always needed. It needs the Yankees to keep acting and playing like the Yankees. It needs these Yankees to end this madness so we can move on with the rest of our lives. It needs the Yankees to paraphrase a longtime Yankees fan named Paul Simon.
A city turns its lonely eyes to you, Yankees.
(Woo, woo, woo.)
“I know we got something special in that room, there’s no question about that,” Yankees manager Aaron Boon said after the Yankees wrapped up a 7-2 swing through the West Coast with a feel-great 7-5 comeback win against the Giants at San Francisco’s Oracle Park on Sunday.
“Where that takes us, we’ll see. We do have a long way to go and they all understand that. But the singular focus on the team and on winning and on what can we do today to win a game and the purpose — I keep saying that word all year. It just feels like the purpose they’re playing the game with, and for one another, you can feel that in here every day. That’s fun to be a part of.”
It’s become fun and downright addicting to watch. We’re barely into June and we’re already 100 percent allowed to compare Juan Soto and Aaron Judge’s brief partnership to some of the iconic 1-2 punches in team history — to Bernie Williams/Derek Jeter and Thurman Munson/Reggie Jackson, whom many of us saw. But, yes: even to Mickey Mantle/Roger Maris, to Joe DiMaggio/Yogi Berra, to — sacrilege alert — Babe Ruth/Lou Gehrig, which are comps most of us can only speculate about.
They’ve been that good so far.
And yes, Boone is right: It’s dangerous to get too far out over your skis in the first week in June. No team has been more proficient at teaching us that lesson in recent years than the Yankees. The 2022 team was 61-23 on July 8; it finished 39-40. Last year’s club was 36-25 on June 4, when Judge hurt his foot in Los Angeles. They finished 46-55.
History is littered with teams that peaked too soon. But it doesn’t feel that way with the Yankees. Gerrit Cole is coming back soon. Luis Gil has been a revelation. Jasson Dominguez is waiting in the wings. And sometimes, with good teams, you can just spot good karma from a NASA picture taken from outer space.
“That was a fun one to be a part of,” Judge said of Sunday’s game, though he could’ve been talking about every game since March 28.
It’s the Yankees’ turn, maybe their time. It’s happened before. If not for the Yankees, there would’ve been similar droughts in New York between 1940 and 1954, between 1956 and 1968. Each time the city (minus a faction of Dodgers/Giants/Mets fans) turned its lonely eyes to the Yankees.
By October, assuming the Mets haven’t received a heart transplant, those streaks will be 101 and 288 and the city will be doing the same all over again. It’s time.
