First, let me just say that I’ve made Brooklyn my adopted home since 2003, and I tend to go a little overboard when I talk about the place to people who might not give a rat’s ass about it. Asking Adam Underhill about Brooklyn is like asking a baby boomer what 1967 was like – neither one of us will shut up about it, and you’ll nod politely and smile until you finally look at your watch and pretend to have somewhere else to be. But I can’t help it. I find Brooklyn fascinating. Were it not a borough of New York City, it would still stand today as America’s fourth largest city by population. It’s a place as subdivided as any metropolis, by neighborhood and ethnicity. Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg and the Lebanese in Bay Ridge probably know or care very little about each other’s neighborhoods or cultures. Yet the borough as a whole is unified by the idea that, despite its assimilation into New York City way back in 1898, it stands alone among the five boroughs as a fiercely independent city unto itself (although, let’s face it, without colossal Manhattan across the river, Brooklyn as we know it would not exist).

The city’s contribution to sports is remarkable. In basketball, it gave us Michael Jordan, Red Auerbach, and Larry Brown. In football, it produced Vince Lombardi and Joe Paterno. On the baseball diamond, Brooklyn turned out Joe Torre and Joe Pepitone. Two competitors rarely mentioned in the same breath, heavyweight champion Mike Tyson and World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer, hail from Brooklyn. Most famously and importantly, it was here that in 1947 Jackie Robinson made history as the first black player in Major League Baseball.

The notion of living here when the Nets open Brooklyn’s latest chapter in sports history is exciting not only from a basketball fan’s perspective, but from a historical and sociological perspective. I’m not going to kid myself into thinking that it’s going to be sepia-toned 1955 all over again. Any resident old enough to remember having seen a Dodger game at Ebbets Field is probably 60 or older at this point, might not still live here, or is so jaded by having lost his team to LA that he is not particularly interested in the team that’s moving here, OR simply doesn’t care about professional basketball. (Or, he was uprooted from his home by eminent domain so that the arena and complex could be built, and has a voodoo stickpin doll of real estate developer Bruce Ratner in a shoebox under his bed.) Nevertheless, I think that it’s going to bring exciting change to a place that’s already changed drastically since the Giuliani years. Sports teams don’t solve society’s ills, but they are certainly not the cause of them. They do instill a sense of shared civic pride and identity that is at least on par with museums, symphony orchestras, public parks, and institutions of higher learning. (To say nothing of the additional potential of a 20,000-seat arena: concerts, political conventions, circuses, Ice Capades, graduation ceremonies, etc.)