Welcome to an opening night where anything is possible

The Knicks are back, and possibly better than ever. Leave your concerns at the door — anything is possible for this version of the Knickerbockers.

There is an unmistakable buzz to the start of an NBA season, that goes beyond the welcome return of whichever team you’ve foolishly entrusted your day-to-day disposition to. It’s not just that basketball is back, but that from the crowded and fidgety start line, waiting for the regular season guns GO!, as 30 teams stare down their various horizons, a fundamental ingredient of sports fandom is at its most visible, its most infectious, its most naked: that anything — at that precise moment, pregnant with possibility — can still happen.

From MVP candidate Julius Randle to NBA Champion Bobby Portis: it's all on the table on opening night.

The day of the start of a new season is when anticipation peaks. That last heaving bulge of unknown. Before the games begin and the possibilities start to pick each other off.

This offseason, the media’s spotlight has been determinedly leveled at all the various ways the Knicks can come crashing back down to Earth after last season’s thunderbolt of unexpected success. A course correction of some kind, a gasping exhale of sorts, is widely expected. Those plucky New York Knicks are ripe for all manner of rude regressional awakenings, we’ve been told. And retold. And told some more.

But, while we still can, as we square up to a season that apparently has us in its sights, it’s worth acknowledging the full spectrum of possibilities. The other side of that karmic statistical coin.

What if everything comes up blazing-blue and golden-orange? What if the least predicted possibilities are the last ones standing? What if we’re overthinking an already good team getting better?

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