2025-26 New York Knicks
111 · 2026-05-04 · medium
On Sunday evening, Internationizale Milano clinched the 2025-26 Serie A title with three matches to spare, and as such are the footsoccer champions of Italy for the 21st time. (It's actually the 20th time, if you know you know, and I say this as a fan.) They'll get to put a little shield with the Italian tricolor on their chests in 2026-27; their uniforms did look a little naked without them this year. During the confetti celebrations, the public address system blasted "Made in Romania" by Ionut Cercel, and the walls of San Siro reverberated with a 80,000-person singalong, even though all the lyrics are in – you guessed it – Romanian. It's been Inter's unofficial theme song since they won the 2023-24 Serie A title, when Turkish midfielder Hakan Calhanoglu played it on his phone in the locker room and the TikToks went viral. If you're Moldovan, Transylvanian or Gypsy / It doesn’t matter where you live or what dialect you speak / Have fun and drink like it’s your country / Da dumla dumla da da dumla dumla da. It's the kind of pro-unity and anti-fascist message you'd expect from a club that's all about transcending borders; it's been right there in the name since Mussolini died. The only kinds of people that Internazionale supporters are racist against are Juventus and AC Milan fans. Anyway, basketball. The "team anthem" hasn't really caught on in the hoop game like it has in other sports. Music can burn a postseason run into long-term memory; instances that immediately come to mind are the 2018-19 St. Louis Blues (Laura Branigan's "Gloria") and the Philadelphia Phillies of the 2020s ("Dancing On My Own" by Robyn). This is serious cognitive science, the psychology of mnemonic disinhibition and "involuntary memory": unexpected stimuli can lead to richer neural encoding, enhanced associative processing, and superior recollection. It's also lots of fun to sing along to pop bangers with your friends and teammates. Thankfully, it looks like the NBA is finally catching up. After New York beat Denver on the road by 39 points on March 6, the Knicks locker room played Natasha Bedingfield's "Unwritten" so loudly that it was audible during the Nuggets' postgame press conference. This minivancore classic, originally released in 2004, has been building a basketball legacy for several years now, since Russell Westbrook felt the rain on his skin. More recently, as the song has been gaining momentum in New York, Stephen Curry was caught on film drenching himself in words unspoken. After dispatching Atlanta in the first round, the Knicks are staring at the blank page before them, but the window is a little less dirty: they'll face the No. 7 Sixers instead of the No. 2 Celtics. So what's the next completely random song to gain adoption as a locker room anthem? Will it be yacht rock, Neue Deutsche Welle, midwest emo, witch house? Could it be a sevenths-and-ninths smooth remix of a J-Pop deep cut from 2002?