40 years ago, the Mets did the impossible — and brought the city together.
The most magical moment of my life — at least so far — was followed almost immediately by the most frightening. And I can’t stop thinking about it lately, especially in a year defined by another New York miracle.
It all unfolded some 40 years ago, on Oct. 25, 1986, as I stood in the left-field nosebleed seats of Shea Stadium. A dribbler slapped up the first base line by the Mets’ Mookie Wilson scooted under the mitt and between the legs of the Boston Red Sox’s Bill Buckner, sending Ray Knight dashing home to cap the most amazing comeback in World Series history.
I instantly found myself flailing in a sea of blue and black down jackets that wind-whipped night, as the stadium erupted into a massive, raucous group hug — all strangers united by the heartstopping ending of Game 6.
But that wasn’t the frightening part. The ballpark swayed and shook under the trampling of some 110,000 feet, seemingly all stomping in time to chants of “Let’s go Mets! Let’s go Mets!” screamed at the top of hoarse lungs.
My ecstasy turned to fear as 20-year-old me became convinced Shea would collapse as quickly as the Red Sox had. Well, at least we’d die happy.
Still, I became intent on getting out of the stadium at Mookie Wilson-like speed. My panic only grew as the throngs charged down the now-bouncing exit ramps.
When I finally made it to field level, I didn’t flee, even if moments before, the movie in my mind played and replayed the scene of the concrete bandbox folding and crushing us all.
Up ahead, I could see it in the distance: the stadium’s red phone booth, the only means of communication out of Shea for most of us, in an era when only the rich carried comically large prehistoric cellphones. (The only reason I was even in the ballpark was thanks to tickets I’d scored via connections at the accounting firm where I was working my way through college, stapling tax returns.)
I joined the long phone line for the same reason as everybody else: to call home and cry, “Can you believe it, Ma? Can you believe it?”
When I finally got my turn in the booth, I could barely hear my mother — and not just because of the Shea crowd. “The whole neighborhood’s going crazy,” she said, as a cacophony of car horns and happy hollering bled from our Brooklyn street into the kitchen phone.
For a moment, I felt a pang of what’s now called FOMO. I wished I were home, partying with my friends in the streets of Sunset Park.
The day after the Mets’ almost anticlimactic Game 7 win, I got to celebrate with another frighteningly packed and raucous crowd of New Yorkers — reportedly 2.2 million of them — after cutting class to attend the ticker-tape parade that ended outside City Hall. Mayor Ed Koch, less than a year into his scandal-ridden third and final term, was beaned by boos as he tried to speak.
''The Mets made us a family,'' said Koch, who famously bore no love for sports, yet donned a Mets cap for the occasion. ''The Mets made us a small town with love and affection. Today we're all one family.''
I left the celebration convinced there would never again be anything as magical in New York sports history as the Mets’ amazing triumph — a notion I clung to for decades as I (mostly) suffered as a diehard fan.
Fast-forward to this past June 13. I watched on TV from some friends’ apartment in Dumbo — a place only a hardy few dared to tread in 1986 — as the Knicks sealed their first NBA championship in more than half a century.
This time, I charged out the front door and got to experience the euphoria consuming the streets of the only borough I’ve ever lived in and the only place I wanted to be for the buoyant culmination of the Knicks’ incredible journey. As in 1986, the city gave way to shared bliss, momentarily putting aside the never-ending daily mishegoss to come together across generations and neighborhoods. The only thing more miraculous than the unlikely sports triumphs, four decades apart, was their power to unite a perennially fractured city.
And even if I was nearly 40 years closer to death, this time the magic came without fear.
But this time around, I couldn’t get anywhere near the victory parade, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a rabid Knicks fan handed a present, wrapped in orange and blue, barely six months into his first term — gave a thunderously cheered, soaring eight-minute speech from City Hall’s front porch.
Some of his lofty words extolling the Knicks’ “magical” run echoed the spirit of the abbreviated remarks delivered by Koch five years before Mamdani’s birth.
“So often, when this city comes together, it is because we are forced to by a moment of tragedy or adversity,” said Mamdani, who wore a Knicks jersey under his trademark suit jacket. “What a gift it is to be brought together by pure, unfiltered joy.”
And what a gift it is to receive twice in a lifetime, these occasional bursts of magic that unite our city across very different eras. Is it too much to hope for future miracles?
I guess if I believe in magic, I must believe in incantations. Here’s mine, based on an instant-classic New York internet meme (something else that didn’t exist in 1986):
Our mayor is Muslim
Our bagels are Jewish
Mets in ‘86
Knicks in five
Our city’s alive!
