In the heart of Manhattan, between Sixth Avenue and 50th Street, Prince’s song 1999 blared from the speakers of Radio City Music Hall. Hundreds of New York Knicks fans gathered amid the concrete jungle, the noise and neon lights, minutes after their team’s 11th straight playoffs win. Their 130-93 rout of the Cleveland Cavaliers to sweep the Eastern Conference final 4-0 was no ordinary victory. Twenty-seven years later, and for the first time in the 21st century, the Knicks are once again in an NBA Finals. The challenge ahead is enormous: to win the franchise’s first title in more than half a century, the only two championships in its history still frozen in black and white in 1970 and 1973.

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New Yorkers didn’t hesitate to make their displeasure heard during Donald Trump’s attendance at one of the city’s most important sporting nights in decades. In a packed Madison Square Garden, as the national anthem played before the start of the first NBA Finals game to be staged in New York in 27 years, fans erupted in boos when the president of the United States — the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals game — appeared in his box, protected by bulletproof glass, and appeared on the arena’s giant screen. The Republican offered a mocking smile as the game between the Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs got under way in a series the New Yorkers now lead 2-1 after the visitors’ 115-111 victory.

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