Sporting joy, part two

I began my last piece about Arsenal’s championship season by describing how my youngest son - let’s call him the Joyseeker - took himself off to the environs of Crystal Palace FC when they won the FA Cup in 2025, just so that he could participate in celebrations that had nothing to do with him. Well, after he had squeezed every last drop out of Arsenal’s triumph this year (there was the night they won, and the day they got the trophy, and the open-top bus parade), he and some friends flew to New York and landed a couple of hours before the decisive fifth game of the NBA play-offs. They had gone for the World Cup, so the Knicks were a bonus. They watched Game Five in a bar, bought Knicks T-shirts, and then took to the streets for yet more revelry.

The Joyseeker wasn’t the only person to float blissfully on these two clouds. Spike Lee and Zohran Mamdani, both of them Knicks and Arsenal fans, were up there with him. I gave up trying to judge who is a real fan a long time ago, probably since the day a big Hollywood producer insisted on taking me out to lunch in LA because she was “an Arsenal obsessive”. I was, it’s fair to say, doubtful. What could that possibly mean? I presumed that she’d seen a game once when she was in London, and every now and again looked at the league tables. That was not the case. She had spent the morning watching a live feed of a youth team match, and wanted to talk about a couple of players she was excited by. I couldn’t really help her. I had not spent the morning watching a live feed of a youth team match.