The Game I Almost Turned Off

Last night, I almost turned off the game that became the biggest comeback in NBA Finals history.

The Knicks were down 29 in the third quarter of Game 4, and I had the remote in my hand. I was calm on the outside but hurting on the inside. I knew there was still time, but this was getting out of control. I didn't turn it off. I've been a Knicks fan through thick and thin, mostly thin, since the Ewing years, and my old business partner Lee Kowarski and I had season tickets through the 2000s, so I stayed with it.

That urge to skip the hard part is one I know well at work and in my career, and one I watch the leaders I coach give in to all the time, usually right when it matters most.

I do it when it isn't a game, too. The quarter comes in under plan, and before I've let myself feel the miss, I'm already rewriting the forecast and lining up whom to call. It feels like momentum, but most of the time it's just me getting away from how it feels. 

What I do with leaders in that moment is help them stay with the loss long enough to know what they want before they start fixing it, because the decisions that come out of that are almost always better than the ones made on the run from a bad feeling.

The Knicks were the opposite of me that night. Down 29, with a loss meaning a tied series and a trip back to San Antonio, they didn't look like they were thinking about any of it. They weren't stuck on the quarter they'd given away or running ahead to what losing would mean. They just played the next possession, and then the one after that.

There's a reason that's so hard: when you fall behind, your brain doesn't draw much of a line between a collapsing quarter and a real physical threat, so it floods you with stress hormones, and sitting still starts to feel almost impossible. A brain drowning in those hormones can't read a defense or make a free throw, which is what all that staying in the next possession actually protects. The rest of us reach for motion instead, and the motion feels like leadership.

The strange part is that we leave the wins just as fast. The promotion comes through, and we're already onto the next thing, the team pulls off something hard, and we send a one-line thank-you and move down the agenda. If you skip the lows to protect yourself, you tend to skip the highs the same way.

I'm not writing this from the far side of having figured it out. I still pick up the remote, but lately I've been catching the moment I want to get up and do something instead of staying with how it feels, and trying to stay a beat longer than is comfortable.

I can't control most of it, whether the deal closes or the quarter turns or the Knicks come back. The only part that's mine is whether I'm awake for it, and whether I let myself feel the wins when they come, at work and in my career, maybe even the Knicks finally winning a championship after more than fifty years.