We bonded plenty over baseball, the way most fathers and sons do, but it always went back to basketball for my old man, and always went back to the Knicks, and mostly went back to the early 1950s and some very good Knicks teams that were never quite good enough to beat the Minneapolis Lakers in the Finals.
It wouldn’t take much to get my father reminiscing, and soon he was back in the balcony at the Old Garden on 50th and Eighth, enveloped by cigarette smoke (to which he contributed his fair share), watching the Knicks play the Tri-Cities Blackhawks or the Fort Wayne Pistons or the Syracuse Nats.