It is going to hurt me to say this. Really hurt. Yet after the Lakers' second straight loss to those spunky kids from Sacramento two nights ago, it must be said. Cough Cough. The New York Knicks will Cough Cough, beat the Los Angeles Lakers in six games for the NBA title this June.

Let me say just off the bat that I'm from Chicago, and grew up cheering for the Bulls more than any other sports team. I toiled for years as Michael Jordan and company lost repeatedly to the Detroit Pistons, the self-proclaimed Bad Boys, in some of the most intense and thrilling playoff series I have ever seen.

I was too young to remember the best of the Pistons-Celtics and Lakers-Celtics match-ups at the time, so the Bulls versus the Motor City Champs was the most passionate rivalry that I had seen. Along with the help of Scottie Pippen and the Zenmaster Phil Jackson, Jordan was able to exercise three consecutive years of Bad Boy playoff demons with a convincing sweep of the back-to-back champions in the 1991 Eastern Conference Finals. Chicago went on the beat the Magic Johnson-led Lakers, the Team of the '80s, in five games and a dynasty was born.

So it was all good, right? We had just vanquished our most hated adversaries in a sweet romp, and the nucleus of the team was relatively young. There would be years and years to come where we would breeze through the league to hoist the Larry O'Brien Trophy again without competition in sight. Although looking back at the '90s, it is apparent that this was actually the case, a shrewd move by Knicks management in the summer of 1991 resulted in a heated rivalry that consumed most of the following decade in basketball.

Deciding that spending time with Bob Costas in the NBC booth was a little too much fun for his own good, former Lakers coach Pat Riley joined the New York Knicks in hopes of turning a former 50-win team in the '80s into a championship contender. If there was a defining moment and turning point for modern Knick basketball, it came the following June in the 1992 Eastern Conference semis.

With a physical style remnant of the '80s Detroit squads, the Knicks set out to dispatch the defending champion Bulls after beating the Pistons in five games in the first round. The Bulls had gone 67-15 in the regular season and were the prohibitive favorites to repeat as champs in the postseason. The Knicks, refusing to let themselves roll over and give up, stretched Chicago to only one of two seventh games it would play in its six championship years under the guidance of Patrick Ewing, John Starks, and Anthony Mason.

In one of the most thuggish moves of the year, and one which epitomized the nascent bitterness between the two teams, Starks clothes-lined Pippen in the sixth game as the Bulls all-star went up for a dunk. The emotions spilled into the final and deciding game of the series when Xavier McDaniel actually challenged Pippen to a fight on the court. Refusing to let his team back down though, Jordan dropped 42 points to lead his team to the clinching victory and sent an emphatic signal to New York that they'd always have to go through Chicago if they wanted to earn a ring.

Over the course of the '90s, these teams would meet four more times, with the Bulls' only loss coming after Jordan had retired the first time and Hugh Hollins blessed the Knicks with a phantom foul call on Pippen in the waning moments of the pivotal fifth game. Even though the rivalry was basically one-sided, a Chicago-New York match-up never ceased to be special. Memorable moments such as Charles Smith's four layup misses at the end of Game 5 of the 1993 Conference Finals or Patrick Ewing finally rejoicing after beating the Bulls in the seventh game of their 1994 series left an indelible stain on the sports rivalry of the '90s.