There are now Nets fans younger than I.
I first confronted this in the summer of 2019, nearly a month after Adrian Wojnarowski decided 31-year-old DeAndre Jordan signing a $10-million-a-year contract was enough to constitute a “Clean Sweep” of that summer’s prized free agents. I was once again working at a summer camp, but for the first time, there were little Nets fans running around.
Many of them, I would learn, were first or second-gen New Yorkers whose parents had given them no reason to root for any one team, whose local fandom extended as far occasional birthday tickets to Nets or Knicks games until the former franchise signed two of their lifelong basketball icons.