My embrace of the Nets began seven years ago when the Knicks — the only team I had ever rooted for — shunned a gift from the basketball gods by letting Jeremy Lin leave town. It was the final indignity after years of atrocious basketball. I dumped my Knicks season tickets and adopted the fledgling club whose arena had just risen over my Brooklyn neighborhood.

I did not do so lightly. As a born-and-bred New Yorker, I saw abandoning a team as a serious breach of the tribal code. I disdained fans from other cities who rooted for two teams in the same sport. I was unremittingly harsh to the worst transgressor of all: the bandwagon fan. (If that Steph Curry jersey you own was the first Warriors gear in your closet, yes, I’m talking about you.)

But I was hopping on no bandwagon. With the exception of a pair of distant trips to the N.B.A. finals, the New Jersey-turned-Brooklyn Nets were a pathetic franchise. I was living in Brooklyn. My father had grown up in Queens and traveled on a streetcar to watch the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. I was not abandoning my tribe. I was returning to it.

This is what I told myself as I began reading about the odd collection of players I was now rooting for, trying to divine the narrative that would make it real. I fought through a sense of exile in the slick, new Barclays Center, which was full of fans for whom the game itself appeared peripheral to the cool Brooklyn food, the dancing during timeouts, and whatever fascinating things were happening on their phones.

Yes, it was a gorgeous arena with excellent sightlines and welcoming staff. The season tickets I bought the day the Knicks said goodbye to J-Lin put me in seats that were a 10-minute walk from my house in Prospect Heights. Madison Square Garden was a cramped dump reached via a creaking subway and a walk through the bowels of Penn Station.

Yet there was something about the Garden, even as the Dolan era yielded a lost decade of basketball. The crowd understood. Hustle plays drew appreciation in an arena that had revered Charles Oakley. The energy was electric.

In Brooklyn, the mostly mercenary fans got what we deserved: a team of past-their-prime castoffs imported by the bombastic Russian magnate, Mikhail Prokhorov, who had brought the franchise to Brooklyn. Vowing to spend whatever it took to eclipse the Knicks — a low bar — he built a bonfire of money at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic.