From the Moon to the Mets
by: Michael Madorsky, CIO
In the spring of 2026, I find myself toggling between two very different screens. On one, I watch a gleaming spacecraft arc toward the Moon, knowing that four human beings are strapped inside, heading farther from home than anyone has traveled in more than half a century. On the other, I see maps of the Middle East, missile trajectories, and the familiar theater of American politics. The split screen feels chaotic and disorienting, but also strangely familiar. I have seen something like this before—just not as a 60 or 70 something watching cable news, but as a 10 year old kid in 1968.
In 1968, I was old enough to follow the headlines, but still young enough to assume that my parents had the answers. My memories of that year come back as flashes of television images and expressions on grownup faces. Vietnam was not an abstraction; it was on the evening news almost every night—jungle footage, helicopters, maps with arrows showing offensives whose names I didn’t yet understand. I did not grasp the strategy of the war, but I knew that when the anchorman talked about “Tet,” my parents went quiet and leaned in closer to the TV.
Some of the clearest snapshots in my mind are not of battle scenes but of the aftermath of assassinations. When Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in April, I watched my parents absorb the news in a way that told me this was not just another story. I remember fire on the screen and the word “riots,” and the sense that something very big and very bad was happening in cities I had never been to. Two months later, when Robert F. Kennedy was shot; there was a numbness in our house. Even at 10, I could feel it: this was not how things were supposed to go.
The Democratic convention in Chicago that summer is another blurred but powerful memory. I didn’t understand the politics, but I remember the images of police and protesters clashing in the streets, the sense of the country arguing with itself in public. Somewhere in that swirl, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run again. I probably did not appreciate the gravity of that decision at the time, but I absorbed the larger feeling: my parents were worried, and they could not quite hide it.
And then, at the end of that terrible year, everything shifted from those chaotic street level images to something almost impossibly serene: a spacecraft leaving Earth. On Christmas Eve, my family gathered around a bulky television—one of those sets that felt like a piece of furniture—to watch the Apollo 8 broadcast from lunar orbit. I do not remember the exact words from Genesis the astronauts read; what I remember is the hush in the room, the grainy black-and-white picture, and that strange, beautiful shot of the Earth rising over the Moon’s horizon. For a 10-year-old who had spent the year watching his country come apart on TV, it was the first time I saw our planet as a small, fragile ball hanging in the dark. I did not have the language for it then, but I understood that it meant something.
Fast-forward 58 years, and I am back to watching a spacecraft head for the Moon against a backdrop of war and political division. This time it’s Artemis rather than Apollo, a new rocket, a new capsule, an international crew. The graphics are slicker, the commentators are different, and I am the one noticing the worried looks on younger faces instead of the child trying to read the room. But the emotional architecture feels familiar: a sense that the world is dangerously off kilter, and yet we are still capable of aiming for something higher than our current arguments.
Looking back, my memories of that era do not stop with the war and Apollo 8. The late ’60s and early ’70s were also when I discovered what it meant to be a sports fan, and if you grew up in the New York area, that discovery came with an almost ridiculous run of good fortune.
Football gave me the initial jolt. In January 1969, the New York Jets played the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. The Colts were not just favored; they were seen as vastly superior, symbolic of the established NFL’s dominance over the upstart AFL. Joe Namath’s guarantee of victory is now football folklore, but at the time it sounded reckless, maybe delusional. And then the Jets went out and won, 16–7. Namath jogging off the field, finger raised, is one of those images I can pull up instantly. You do not forget the first time you see the underdog back up a bold promise on the biggest stage.
In the summer of 1969, I was 11 and fully indoctrinated into the ritual of watching baseball. The Mets had been lovable losers for as long as I’d been paying attention, a team my parents and their friends joked about more than respected. That’s part of why the “Miracle Mets” season is burned into my mind. I remember the growing realization, even in a kid’s brain, that they weren’t just playing well—they were going to win. I can still see the images of Shea Stadium when they clinched the World Series, the field swarmed by fans. Over the years, I’ve rewatched that footage enough times that the line between memory and replay has blurred, but the feeling remains pure: disbelief turning into joy.
Basketball rounded out the trifecta. The early’70s Knicks were my introduction to what beautiful, unselfish team play looked like. I did not fully appreciate the subtleties of Walt Frazier’s Game 7 masterpiece or the nuances of Red Holzman’s system. What I do remember is Willis Reed limping out of the tunnel and the roar that followed, even though a television speaker. I remember knowing, in that instant, that I was watching something that would be talked about for the rest of my life.
As a kid, I did not tie all of this together. I did not say to myself, “We are living through the Vietnam War, assassinations, urban unrest, and also a Moon mission and a historic run of New York championships.” I just absorbed it: the fear and confusion of the news; the awe of Apollo 8; the shock and delight of the Jets, Mets, and Knicks winning it all in quick succession. Only later did those strands braid themselves into a story in my mind about how messy and surprising history can be.
Which brings me back to 2026 and those two screens. Once again, we are watching a war in the Middle East with no easy answers. Once again, American politics feels brittle, angry, and exhausted. Once again, there is a spacecraft on its way to circle the Moon, asking us—if only for a moment—to look up from our arguments and remember that we are capable of extraordinary things when we decide to focus on them.
And for me, once again, there are New York teams hovering in the background, carrying all the emotional weight they have accumulated over a lifetime of fandom. The odds that the Mets, Jets, and Knicks could replicate that late’60s, early’70s trifecta in the coming year are, to put it kindly, minuscule. Modern sports economics and analytics do not leave much room for fairytale runs across three different leagues in one city.
But when I ask, “Could the same thing happen in the coming year?” I am not really running the probabilities. I am thinking like that 10-year-old in 1968 who watched his country go through hell, then watched Apollo 8 rise above it, and then, just when it seemed too much to ask, watched his teams in New York do the impossible, one after another. I know better now than to expect history to line up so neatly again. Yet, I also know better than to insist it cannot.
In 1968, I learned—without quite realizing it—that the story of any given year is rarely just one thing. It is possible for a country to be deeply wounded and still produce moments of genuine wonder. It is possible for a city to feel frayed and angry and still erupt in shared joy when an underdog pulls off the unthinkable. It is possible for a world mired in conflict to pause, however briefly, to listen to a voice broadcast from lunar orbit and see itself anew.
So no, I do not expect the Mets, Jets, and Knicks to all win titles as Artemis swings around the Moon and the world tries to navigate another dangerous chapter. But I do expect to be surprised by something. The lesson I took from being 10 years old in 1968 is that history almost never sticks to the script we have written for it in our heads. The rocket launches, the ball takes a funny bounce, the long shot comes in. The odds say we are not in for a repeat of those miracle years. The kid in me still remembers what it felt like when the odds were wrong.
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