As the summer wears on, with training camps and preseason play still off in (what feels like) the distant future, we turn our attention to the past. Join us as we while away a few late-summer moments recalling some of the most scintillating slams of yesteryear, the most thunderous throwdowns ever to sear themselves into our memories. This is Dunk History.

Today, Dan Devine recalls John Starks' left-handed slam in the final minute of the New York Knicks' victory over the Chicago Bulls in Game 2 of the 1993 Eastern Conference final — a.k.a., "The Dunk."

It wasn't shocking that John Starks had the temerity to take it himself against the two-time defending champions in the final minute of a one-possession conference finals game, driving right at the goggles of All-Defensive Second-Teamer Horace Grant with Michael Jordan flying in on the late contest. Starks had the hops, after all — lest we forget, he made the semifinals of the 1992 Slam Dunk Contest — and this was a player whose determination to attack led him to try to scale the 7-foot Patrick Ewing, the shot-blocking face of the Knicks, during the final scrimmage of their 1990 training camp.

After stints at three separate junior colleges and Oklahoma State, after going undrafted and getting little more than a cup of coffee with Don Nelson's Golden State Warriors, and after a year split between the Continental Basketball Association and World Basketball League, Starks came to camp in search of a job better than bagging groceries in Tulsa. Literally. He needed to make a splash, and there was the basket, and there was Ewing, so here went nothing, as Mike Wise wrote in the New York Times:

Basketball was not Starks's career as much as it was his life. Both hung in the balance as he took flight.

"I blocked it," Ewing said, smiling at the memory. "I remember the whole play."

Starks [...] said: "Yeah, the Big Fella got me. I twisted my knee on the play. Had to go on the injury list. You can't predict how things are going to work out."

It worked out about as well as it could have. The Knicks were ready to cut him, according to then-assistant Jeff Van Gundy, but couldn't while he was on the injured list; his return to health coincided with Trent Tucker getting hurt, so Pat Riley gave him a shot. In a perfectly appropriate turn, Starks eagerly took that shot, producing 20-point performances off the bench in his second and third appearances while taking whatever defensive assignment Riley threw at him.

Attacking earned Starks a roster spot. Attacking opened the door to the Knicks' rotation, and attacking kept him there even after Tucker's return. Starks' NBA come-up was all about attacking. Why wouldn't his finest moment be about it, too?

***

I thought about the Knicks while reading Matt Ufford's fantastic essay on rooting for the U.S. men's national soccer team back in June. As Ufford writes, we don't get to root for underdogs very much as Americans, and the USMNT offers an appealing opportunity to support the kind of squad with whom many of us more closely identify: "As individuals, we see ourselves as fighting the odds in life, overcoming obstacles with sweat and cunning. We look for the same traits in the teams we support."

The same holds true if you take the focus from the U.S. as a whole and shrink it down to just New York City. Lots of people in New York City, where I live, are more than happy to do that. John Updike once wrote (in The New Yorker, naturally) that the "true New Yorker [has] a secret belief that people living anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding." He was later regarded (by The New York Times, naturally) as having "nailed it."

New York exceptionalism — the belief that, as Joey Litman once wrote at FreeDarko, "everything must be the best because it is of New York, and, naturally, it is of New York because it is the best" — isn't just something people here feel; it is literally the name of an e-seminar produced by Columbia University, one where "Professor Kenneth Jackson establishes the ways in which New York City is unique," and argues that "when we look at New York, we are not just looking at another place. We are looking at a very special place." (Columbia sits at 116th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Naturally.)