The Knicks are back!

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There was no need for qualifiers now. The final seconds were bleeding off the clock, and Tim Hardaway Jr. was exhorting the sold-out crowd to shout ever stronger, roar ever louder. The other Knicks were flipping the ball around, the basketball equivalent of the victory formation. A few Raptors extended their hands. “This,” Hardaway said soon after, “was an all-out team effort.” So much of the first quarter of this Knicks season has been about italics and asterisks and parentheses.

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This was for something else. This was to prove they belong, that they really can play with anybody. They hinted at that against Cleveland, but couldn’t close the deal that night. They closed this time. “We challenged the guys at halftime,” Knicks coach Jeff Hornacek said. “We played hard in the first half, but that’s a great team with a lot of energy and they really got after us. But we told them to put the pressure on and make nothing easy and they responded in that third quarter. They were great.”

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