As with any natural wonder of the world, the details come wrapped in mystery and shrouded in questions. How long did Linsanity last? How did it end? Why did it end?
Those are matters of accounting. The overall is what most matters, the overarching feeling it delivered you, the absolute gift it was for a city that even then was starving for heroes.
That, of course, is one of those hidden details: the remarkable story of Jeremy Lin was born in the overwhelming shadow of the most recent championship secured by our city. On the evening of Saturday, Feb. 4, 2012, most of New York’s sporting attention was lasered on Indianapolis, where the next evening the Giants would try to duplicate a trick they’d turned four years earlier: knocking off the favored Patriots in a Super Bowl.
The game played at Madison Square Garden that night was barely noticed, and would’ve been little remembered but for one thing: little-used guard Jeremy Lin scored 25 points for the night, 19 in the second half. He dished out seven assists. The Knicks, 8-15 in a lockout-ravaged season, spotted the Nets a 30-18 lead. Lin saw to it that they would win, 99-92.
The crowd chanted “M-V-P!”
They chanted: “JER-UH-MEE!!!”
And then it was off. It would last 11 games. It would last 19 days. It was gone as soon as it arrived, and there was an almost immediate counterattack by factions of the game determined to expose Lin’s weaknesses. He got hurt, was a nonfactor down the stretch of the season as the Knicks recovered, made the playoffs and got stomped on by the Heat.
And then he was gone: the Rockets stepped in, offered a $35 million poison-pill provision at the 11th hour in July that would’ve ransacked the Knicks’ salary structure, this after Lin had assured them he was coming back. The last seven years haven’t been kind, not to Lin (who put together a solid career but never again reached those heights) and the team (which immediately won 54 games and a playoff series the next year without him, a detail that always seems lost in the retelling) and then began a steady and harrowing free fall to the NBA’s dungeons.
It almost feels like a dream sometimes.
Still. If you were in the building for any of those 11 games, across any of those 19 days and nights, you know there was nothing ethereal about it. This was real. This happened. Jeremy Lin fell from the sky and was the best basketball player for 11 games and for 19 days and nights. He made arenas boil in anticipation, made crowds bubble in excitement. The Giants were world champs, the Yankees were the Yankees, the Mets had a young phenom named Harvey they would soon spring on the city. Those were all immediate costars.
Lin was it.
Lin was everything.
There was one moment I will never forget. It happened Feb. 10 — Game 4, Day 6 — when the Lakers arrived at the Garden. Kobe Bryant was just past the peak of his powers, but his drawing powers were still significant. He played the Garden once a year his whole career. That was always an event. It was always a happening.
On this night, he was Don Rickles, opening for Sinatra.
“I know who he is but I don’t really know what’s going on too much with them,” Kobe said the night before, in Boston. “Honestly, I don’t even know what he’s done.”
That night, Kobe scored 34 points, on 11-for-29 shooting. Lin scored 38, on 13-for-23, an array of deep 3s and fearless drives to the basket, and the Garden was in the palm of his hand.
All of it, actually. Up in the press box, I was sitting next to my friend Ken Berger, then covering basketball for Newsday. The press box is a strictly nonpartisan place. As we like to say: there’s no cheering except for us — fast games, no overtimes and, most importantly, good stories. It was the spirit of the last part that caused Berger and I, in a moment of unscripted, unvarnished wonder, to turn to each other in the instant of another Lin moment and exchange a high five. Honestly, I’ve never come close to doing something like that again.
But in the moment — in the great run of Linsanity — that seemed like perfectly normal behavior. Perhaps in our jaded way, we knew nothing this good could last forever, and of course it turns out we were right. Whenever I saw Berger after that, we always exchanged high-fives. It was that kind of moment. It was that kind of run. Most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. In this decade or any other.
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