Knights

Madison Square Garden sits above Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, built as an arena rather than a stadium, and it was there, not on an open field, that the Knights played their only season. Arena football is an indoor game, run on a shortened field between the boards, and Madison Square Garden's football configuration held 20,789 seats — a fraction of the arena's capacity for other events, but enough for a code that never needed more.

The club was founded in 1988 as New York's entry in the Arena Football League, wearing black and white, and it took the name Knights for a city that had never before fielded a team in the sport. There was no second season. The Knights played out 1988 and folded, leaving Madison Square Garden without an arena football tenant and the league without a team in New York.

Elsewhere the Knights name persisted in the sport under other flags — American college football in Orlando, German amateur football in Oldenburg and in Rothenburg ob der Tauber — but none of them trace back to the club that briefly used Madison Square Garden's boards in 1988. That one, the New York original, exists now only as the answer to how the Garden briefly hosted arena football, for a single year, in the city it was named for.