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But now, as those same down-and-outcast Knicks arrive home for Games 3 and 4 of the NBA Finals, trailing 2-0 to the San Antonio Spurs, it's past time to recognize the fact that the sudden, and frighteningly messianic, popularity of this band of ragamuffins -- and Sprewell in particular -- is directly related to the Diallo shooting and its aftermath. Quite simply, the ne'er-do-well Knicks, who had been unjustly beaten down by the media and their own hellish corporate management, unsuspectingly became the living embodiment of New York's roiling anti-establishment fervor.

Of all the Knicks' hobbling and homely players, the fortunes of Sprewell have surely changed the most dramatically this season. Less than two years after he was tossed out of the league for choking and threatening to kill Golden State Warriors coach P.J. Carlesimo (an ugly incident he made worse by playing the race card, bringing in Johnnie Cochran and suing the NBA), Sprewell finds himself not only strutting on the NBA's biggest stage but starring in a national television spot for apparel company And 1 sports, which starts with him admitting he's made mistakes and finishes with him staring into the camera and saying, "Some people say I'm America's nightmare. I say I'm the American dream."

Not surprisingly, much of the media reacted with horror, accusing the ad of glorifying a bad guy. The New York Post's Phil Mushnick wrote, "The commercial portrays him as an unapologetic creep who couldn't care less what you think of him."

New Yorkers' relationship with Sprewell has been complex from the beginning. Many Knicks fans were uneasy about the baggage he brought, and not entirely convinced that he wasn't a bomb waiting to go off. If anything, the media was more alarmist than the public. As the Knicks began their amazing postseason run, however, fans and the media alike began to take a kinder view of the enigmatic star.

The venerable hometown New York sports media, which has had a rather unpredictable season of its own, has totally misfired on its analysis of the political overtones of Sprewell's redemption saga, oversimplifying it as merely another deplorable example of the way sports figures have only to win to find their moral characters magically elevated. Some of Sprewell's newfound hero status (in a sure sign of his deification, Spike Lee has begun wearing his No. 8 to the games) is no doubt attributable to the upturn in the team's fortunes. but more is involved. While other rehabilitated or quasi-rehabilitated stars, such as Roberto Alomar of umpire-spitting infamy or rapist and ear-biter Mike Tyson, may eventually have their transgressions forgiven, it is quite another thing for the offending act -- particularly the attempted strangling of one's coach -- to become a badge of honor.

Enter Diallo. For many New Yorkers, white and black, united in outrage as they have not been in years at a police department that gunned down Diallo and was proved to have been responsible for the torture of another immigrant, Abner Louima, the fearless defiance Sprewell stood for was emboldening. (Even Roseanne, on a visit last week to the David Letterman show, sang Sprewell's praises.) And when the team began to show signs that it still had some life left after all the abuse it had taken from impatient ownership and a cynical media, it was a short step for Sprewell to be heralded as the Take Back Our Team player in a Take Back Our Town time.

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