• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, February 9, 2012

Fame may be fleeting but it’s also swift. If you thought Tim Tebow was a study in the power of an offshoot of the single-wing offense and a lot of prayer to create an instant folk hero, Jeremy Lin is making Tebow look like he’s on the slow boat.

When Lin woke up last Saturday –- on the couch in the living room of his older brother, Josh, a dental student at NYU, he was a mostly unknown and unheralded National Basketball Association bench rider. Yesterday, the 23-year-old Lin was on the front page of the New York Times and burning up bytes on assorted news websites, blogs and social networks –- acclaimed as a hero by Harvardians, generic Ivy Leaguers, Asian-Americans, Christians, basketball purists, “long-suffering” New York Knickerbocker fans and journalists yearning for an upbeat story to tell.

The struggling Knicks won a third straight victory last night (albeit over the lowly Washington Wizards) in which Lin scored more than 20 points for the third consecutive time. Writes Ian Begley on ESPNNewYork.com:  “He has been passed over in the NBA draft, cut by two teams in the same pre-season and sent to the D-League. Now, he's the impetus for ‘MVP’ chants at Madison Square Garden, a trending topic on Twitter and the latest toast of the Big Apple.”

My personal introduction to the Len phenomenon came less than 24 hours ago by way of the story in the Times by Howard Beck (with an assist by Michael Luo) that captures Lin’s odyssey from Palo Alto High School to Harvard to the NBA as an undrafted, six-foot, three-inch point guard with brains and moxie. Lin’s parents are both engineers who emigrated from Taiwan in the 1970s.

“I think people are surprised, because people don’t know him, or maybe he’s a pioneer,” his mom, Shirley, tell the Times. “There’s not that many Harvard players, not that many Asian-Americans. He’s just kind of like an underdog. But he works hard.”

And he’s low key –- if persistent -- about it, qualities that stand well in the consumer republic. “I don’t think anyone, including myself, saw this coming,” Lin said Monday. "He always said give me a chance and I'll do it," says Knick coach Mike D'Antoni. "And he's doing it." But D'Antoni admits that he was afraid to give Lin that chance before a breakout performance off the bench Saturday night for fear that it would look like he was “pulling straws.” Now, D'Antoni says, "I'm riding him like freakin' Secretariat."

The performances have been no surprise to Lin’s high school coach. "That's what he's been doing his whole life," Peter Diepenbrock tells Begley. "He gets one opportunity, one shot on the big stage and the question is, 'Is he going to make the most of it?' And he does.”

Just like the hula-hoop, WD-40, Lady Gaga and other unlikely phenomena that have transcended the traditional path to success.

“Mega Ran's” Jeremy Lin Rap has about 78,000 views on YouTube; a compilation of play during a breakout game off the bench against the New York Nets (25 points) on Saturday highlights his versatile offensive talents. He scored 28 points against the Utah Jazz’ veteran point guard, Devin Harris, two night later, Frank Isola reports in the New York Daily News.

Lin is attempting to stay in the moment. “I don’t even know beyond this week, to be honest,” he says in Isola’s piece. ‘I can’t look at that now for my own sake mentally. Just try to take it game by game.”

Writing in Bleacher Report, Gabe Zaldivar proffers that the “reason for Linsanity or Tebowmania is wider-reaching” than the fact that they both “are happy to thank God in public.”

“The fact of it all is that we want to believe in the unlikely hero. We want to believe that we could go out there and shoot a sweet jumper and cash in on the passion we have for the game, even if the talent is absent,” he says. And he points to the two-minute Clint Eastwood spot for Chrysler during the Super Bowl as proof of the hypothesis.

Eastwood “gives a monologue to end all commercial monologues to sell some Chrysler automobiles,” writes Zaldivar. “At least that's the cynics' take. But what he was really selling was ‘hope’ that we’d soon be pulling out of the recession.

“Guys like Jeremy Lin and Tim Tebow shouldn't succeed, but do,” Zaldivar says. Indeed, they’ve turned hope into a reality that suits our fantasies. Just like any breakthrough product.