How does Jeremy Lin happen?

How is it even possible?

Sports are about the closest thing we have to a meritocracy. This sport scours the earth for granules of talent and doesn’t often get fooled by packaging. It doesn’t matter if you are a 5-3 bowling ball from Baltimore (Muggsy Bogues) or a 7-6 foul pole from the Sudan (Manute Bol), if you can play even a little, you will get an opportunity to prove it. With all the eyes and information and resources surrounding sports, in an obsessive era when even grade-school talent is being ranked and mined, basketball stars don’t just fall out of the sky as if by parachute.

But Lin didn’t get any athletic scholarships out of high school. He was undrafted out of college. He bounced around the D-League’s Reno (Nev.) Bighorns and Erie (Pa.) Bayhawks before being waived by Golden State and Houston, something the Rockets general manager now concedes was a mistake. I know the discovery of sports talent is very unscientific, but I have to wonder: Is this wonderful story a byproduct of — and I’ve never had this much difficulty separating these two particular things — magic or profiling? Was Lin overlooked because every expert doing the looking thought Lin was wearing a disguise?

Lin is equal parts sports miracle and magic carpet ride, but he is something else, too: Very confusing. His rise doesn’t have a lot of precedent, not in this sport, from end-of-the-bench obscurity to star in the snap of fingers. He was sleeping on his brother’s couch a week ago, and now the Atlanta Hawks are finishing off their win in another city and running to the locker room to find out what Lin did (38 points, of course, against Kobe and the Lakers). The NBA is littered with men who get waived and doubted, men who struggle and persevere to make it to the league. But none of them get to be dreams-do-come-true stars for a week, name in bright lights in New York, with the awe that follows domination and discovery. From struggle to role player in basketball, maybe. From struggle to star, never.

Startling streak

In basketball, the talent is obvious to the eye. You see it early, and then watch it grow. It doesn’t usually get off the bench to dominate a sport’s headlines for a week, never mind off its brother’s couch. Lin wasn’t even a rumor or a whisper a week ago, which seems nearly impossible in the information age. For four games, he has been LeBron, albeit a LeBron in Asian-American packaging. LeBron is the only other guy in the league this season who has put a consistent, four-game streak of 20-plus points, five-plus assists and 50-plus percent shooting. In the history of the league, nobody has ever scored more points in his first four starts than Lin has. Let that one marinate. Nobody in his first four starts has ever scored more points than this guy who was almost completely unknown a week ago. You might find this in fiction or fable, in a colorful book for children, but there’s no precedent for it in the cold, cruel world of competition.

And then there’s this: Lin had been buried on the bench of a bad team — a bad team desperate for a point guard, no less. His coach, a man who gets paid $6 million a year and is supposed to be an expert in point guards, was watching him every day in practice and needed a point guard, mind you. But Mike D’Antoni didn’t play Lin until Amare Stoudemire had to leave the team because his brother died in a car accident and Carmelo Anthony limped off with a groin pull and Baron Davis had a setback in his rehab. So a storm of things conspired to make this so, including a weak schedule, a New York hype math that Times Squares everything and the fact that somebody has to get the statistics to get an NBA team to 80 or 90 points each night.