The NY Liberty carried their torch high through the Canyon of Heroes.
Thousands of New Yorkers crowded lower Manhattan Thursday to witness the highly-anticipated ticker-tape parade celebrating the WNBA team’s first championship win.
The massive seafoam green-clad party started at 10 a.m. and trekked up Broadway’s “Canyon of Heroes” – complete with floats, music, 3,000 pounds of confetti, Liberty mascot Ellie the Elephant and, of course, the WNBA champs themselves.
One particularly excited bunch of spectators were a group of 11 Liberty season ticket holders, both children and parents from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
The children joined the crowed — estimated by the city at 10,000 — as they skipped an art museum school field trip to catch the Liberty ticker tape parade.
“The Museum of Art and Design will probably be open for the next 50 years but we might not ever see another ticker tape parade so we don’t want to miss this one,” said Elsa Lowery, 10, standing next to her mom Angela Carola, 43.
“It’s a reward for all the hard school work and for being little Die Hard fans,” said Kayla Alexander, 29, of Islip, New York – who came with her sister Skyye Alexander and nieces Xena Alexander, 6, and Athena Alexander, 8, who attends Liberty basketball clinics.
“We take them to the games all the time and I wish my parents were able to take me to things like this when we were little,” Kayla added. “This is our first ticker-tape parade.”
Caitlin Rocco, 22, a lifelong Liberty fan from Fresh Meadows, Queens, was also spotted along the parade route with her boyfriend James Cook, 23, and his younger brother Collin Cook, 19.
“I’ve been to Liberty’s fan since birth and I wasn’t going to miss this,” she said, wrapped in a new CVS blanket she bought due to the unexpected chilly weather.
More than 100 bags of confetti were doled out to buildings along Broadway to drop from windows, rooftops and street-level, the Downtown Alliance, which helps support the city-led event, told The Post.
Hundreds of sanitation workers were already at the parade Thursday morning ahead of the main event cleanup, which is expected to take about three hours.
The Liberty won their first WNBA Championship in 28 seasons with a nail-biting 67-62 Game 5 overtime victory on Sunday over the Minnesota Lynx at their Barclays Center home arena.
The ticker-tape parade is the first in history to celebrate a local women’s sports team, and is the first in over a decade to honor a local sports team at all after 2012’s New York Giants Super Bowl win.
The last ticker-tape parade in the Big Apple was 2021’s Hometown Heroes parade celebrating frontline workers who stepped up during the coronavirus pandemic, and the last ticker-tape parade honoring a sports team took place in 2019 for the US women’s soccer team after their FIFA Women’s World Cup win.
A ticketed private ceremony at City Hall Plaza for the WNBA champions will follow at noon. The celebration will continue in Brooklyn later tonight with a party and ceremony at the Barclays Center from 7 to 10 p.m.
“This moment means everything — not only to the Liberty organization, but to our fans and all of New York City,” Keia Clarke, CEO of the New York Liberty, said in a statement announcing the celebration.
“The Liberty have been chasing this dream since 1997 and after a strategic five-year turnaround, driven by ownership’s vision of rebuilding and re-growing this historic team, we are proud to get back to first and win this championship for New York,” Clarke added.
“We take great pride in what we’ve built with our fans — something special that extends far beyond the basketball court — and this moment is just as much for them as it is for us.”