GRAY LINE: LINSANITY ONE FOR US ALL

Jeremy Lin isn’t just living his dream right now, he’s living our dreams as well.

Anybody who ever dreamt as a kid that they would one day play in the NBA but knew realistically that there was no chance, Jeremy Lin is our hero.

As a teen, I wanted to be in the NBA and I wanted to be playing for the Boston Celtics, but lack of height and more importantly, talent, got in my way!

It doesn’t matter who you support, like me you’ve probably been glued to the Knicks games over the last week or so.

I’m sure there are many, many more like me who wondered what it would be like to have played in the NBA and we probably all imagined we could be the instant hero of whichever team we wanted to play for.

And that’s why we’re drawn to Lin’s heroics.

It’s like something out of a movie. A desperate coach has nowhere to turn so he throws in the kid at the end of the bench. You know, the kid who looks like he doesn’t belong there.

He goes into the game, makes an immediate impact, and the rest is history.

It really is a Disney film script. After coming off the bench and impressing, Lin is thrown into the starting line-up the very next game. A few more impressive performances and then the big-bad Lakers come to town.

With Kobe cast in the villain’s role (this would be the case in a movie), Lin takes his game to another level and denies the Lakers.

If you’d taken a script of the above to a Hollywood producer two weeks ago, he’d have laughed at you, but now he’d be biting your hand off to get it made.

Time will tell whether the Jeremy Lin story is made-for-television fare or a Hollywood blockbuster, but either way I look forward to seeing it made.

Of course, Lin hasn’t come from nowhere, he had a solid collegiate career (albeit at a university more known for academic study than building great basketball teams) and he did have a couple of NBA teams prior to landing in New York.

You take one look at Lin and without knowing what he’s done in the last few games, would never imagine someone physically built like him could make it in the NBA, and yet here he is, the new darling of the league.

If David Stern hasn’t already done so, he needs to personally go up to Lin and thank him. No-one is talking about the lockout now and no-one is interested in the shortened regular season — the oft-mentioned ‘Linsanity’ has taken over.

At some point, Lin is going to come crashing down to earth and it’s a no-brainer as not even the greats can play at such a high level for such a sustained period of time.

Watching the Toronto game on Tuesday night, it looked as if this remarkable run would come to an end.

Knicks were down early and down by double figures. In previous games, Lin’s numbers were getting weaker as he got more and more of the defensive focus out on the floor.

But just when we thought it was indeed over, the Knicks came back to tie the game and then Lin wrote another chapter in this amazing story by draining a three-pointer just before the buzzer.

When this remarkable run does end for the Knicks, and it will, it’s how Lin bounces back from that disappointment that will determine his future NBA career.

Personally, I think he could be around for a long time, but then stranger things have happened, such as his rise to fame in the first place.

But whatever happens, it’s a new dawn in New York and the proof of that is that only at the end of the article am I even mentioning Amar’e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony.

How those two adjust to the new order is crucial because if Lin is here to stay, it won’t be their team anymore and they are just going to have to accept it.