Remember “Bing Bong?” No, not the doomed character from Inside Out, although just thinking about him right now made me start crying. I mean a notorious video filmed outside Madison Square Garden after the New York Knicks’ win to open the 2021-22 NBA season, in which every Knicks fan is vibrating with so much vulgar joy that I’m pretty sure they set off Ring cams three states over.

To watch the video — which, again, was filmed when a season was just one game old — is to see Knicks Nation unleashed, not just from a nightmarish 18 months of Covid-19 in the city, but from decades in the NBA wilderness. These are fans who root for a team that have been one of sport’s primary laughing stocks for most of their adult lives. There’s even a joke at their expense in a different Pixar movie. The Knicks fans in the video don’t look like sports fans at all; they look like they were just freed from prison. Which, I guess, they kind of were.

Three-and-a-half years later, this very Monday night, the Knicks beat the defending champion Boston Celtics 108-105, in overtime, in Game 1 of their Eastern Conference semi-final series. It was an incredible upset. The Knicks are widely considered dramatically overmatched by the Celtics — they got smoked by them four times in the regular season — and, on Monday, were once down by 20 points. The Knicks remain heavy underdogs to win the series, let alone the NBA title. But that makes them more loveable to their fans — not less. If you give them a chance, you might be surprised by how much you find yourself cheering for them, too.

The truly incandescent sports stories are the ones that draw you away from the miseries of the real world and allow you to escape into true joy, the ones that make you feel like suffering can be not just withstood, but vanquished. That’s what happens when a team of perpetual losers at last break through and emerge victorious, when decades of cheering for a lousy, frustrating team is proved to have been worth it all along. These are your 2016 Chicago Cubs, your 2004 Boston Red Sox, your 2017 Philadelphia Eagles, a team that so rejoiced their long-tortured fans that one of them, at the team’s victory parade, literally ate horse manure in celebration. (I personally have never been that happy and, all told, am comfortable with that.)

There are not many teams left in professional sport for which a championship would qualify as such a breakthrough — the Buffalo Bills, the Cleveland Browns, maybe the Toronto Maple Leafs. But the Knicks top my list. It has been 52 years, 1973, since the Knicks last finished atop the NBA, and they have reached the NBA Finals only twice in that time, and never this century. This is despite the Knicks being the second-most valuable NBA team — behind the Golden State Warriors, who passed them only three years ago — and easily one of the most popular nationwide.

The Knicks are that rarest of American sports birds, a team with a massive global fanbase who also have a history of failure, thanks largely to the historically meddlesome ownership of James Dolan. (It is an article of faith among Knicks fans that their recent success has happened largely because Dolan has been too distracted by his classic rock band and his investment in Las Vegas’s Sphere to muck anything up.) That combination — huge reach and underdog status — is nearly unprecedented. And it would make a theoretical title feel like a seismic event.

As a Knicks fan — and, obviously, you knew I was a Knicks fan — I can say that this team is particularly likeable. Josh Hart is the sort of hustling rebound lunatic every rec league dad pretends to be but is not; Karl-Anthony Towns is an affable big man who has won the league’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Award; and Jalen Brunson is the platonic ideal of the player fans adore — undersized, underdrafted, underappreciated and unstoppable, a man who has become one of the league’s best players against all odds. (He even has a good podcast, which might be even more rare than being a 6ft 2in NBA All-Star.) The Celtics have become automatons during this championship run, a series of tall shooters who relentlessly hoist three-pointers — they missed an NBA record 45 in their Game 1 loss — and play with a joyless efficiency. The Knicks are your scrappers, your floor divers, your knee scrapers. They’re a very, very easy team to root for.

But even if they were not, there would be no bigger story than even a boring Knicks team winning the NBA title. There are moments at Madison Square Garden, during Knicks games, that it is a fair question to wonder whether the building is going to come apart, that it will spin off its axis and send shards of outer-borough lunatics and celebrity courtside fans — including the perpetually tweeting Ben Stiller — scattered throughout Herald Square.

If the Celtics win a back-to-back title, great: a whole bunch of backwards hat-wearing Barstool fans who listen to the same Bill Simmons podcast on repeat all day will get to put yet another notch on their bedposts. But if the Knicks win, it would unleash a cavalcade of mad joy that might, if just for a second, distract you from everything going on in this world.

The Celtics are the favourites. But the Knicks? The Knicks should be America’s team — or at least what’s left of it. Bing. Bong.

• Will Leitch is the author of the forthcoming Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, a contributing editor at New York magazine and founder of Deadspin. Since the time of writing, the Knicks have done it again, recovering from 20 points down in the second half to beat the Celtics 91-90 and take a 2-0 series lead to Madison Squatre Garden on Saturday