OUR LAST SEASON

A sportswriter pays tribute to one of professional basketball’s most passionate fans.

New York Times scribe Araton, who has written multiple books about the NBA, was relatively new to sportswriting the day he met Michelle Musler, a New York Knicks fan 16 years his senior, when she “crashed an evening gathering of media regulars” at the 1981 All-Star Game. Musler was a Knicks season-ticket holder from the early 1970s to the mid-2010s, most of those years at courtside. She died in 2018 at age 81. In this affectionate memoir, the author describes his decadeslong friendship with this mother of five who divorced her cheating husband when she was in her 30s and started a global executive-training business that often took her away from her kids. Much of the book focuses on Araton’s career and Knicks history. Curiously, Musler is in the background for long passages, a bench player rather than a starter. A lot of the basketball talk—who got traded for whom and so on—is strictly for fans, and some readers may be discomfited by the privilege on display. Not every passionate fan can contact a Knicks source to get tickets to championship road games or have a friend at the Times who “straddled or crossed a fine professional line” by publishing her obituary in a paper that reserves that recognition for more famous figures. At its best, the book shows Musler and Araton addressing universal questions—whether they lived honorable lives, made lasting contributions, or spent enough time with family. Former Knicks coach Pat Riley said a season can end only in winning or misery. For Musler, “her love of the journey was what defined her as a fan.” That’s the message of this book: Between birth and the misery of death, find the happiness in between.

A wise if occasionally rarefied look at the forms that love can take.