Jeremy Lin takes US by storm as basketball's latest sensation hits 136 points in five games for New York Knicks It is an argument shot down in an instant by the Chinese constituency toasting his every no-look pass. Jerry Ma, 36, and of Taiwanese descent, told the Los Angeles Times: "To see a live Asian-American hero unfold before our eyes is something special to us. It means a lot more than anyone could ever imagine. Then there is Lin's much-vaunted Harvard pedigree. Successful transitions from the Ivy League to the NBA remain notoriously rare, but Lin has hardly wasted a second since wearing the colours of the Harvard Crimson. S-A-T!" chanted his disciples in Toronto, parroting the name of the American university entrance exam. Curiously, Lin, who studied economics, had never wanted to attend Harvard in the first place. This native of Palo, Alto, California, headed to Boston only when UCLA, his dream college, rejected him. From that point, a pattern of hope and disappointment seemed perpetually to replicate itself. As an initially undrafted player, he made his NBA debut with Sacramento's Golden State Warriors but found himself demoted to an affiliated D-League team on three occasions. The switch to the Knicks offered scant of a reprieve, given that he was expecting to be placed between 12th and 15th on the roster. Few could have anticipated that Lin would not simply start games at Madison Square Garden, but dominate them. The third - and possibly most complex - component of the Lin phenomenon lies in the strength of his religious conviction. He is fond of characterising his recent rise as a "miracle." Reflecting on Valentine's night, amid the media chaos that greeted his performance against the Raptors, he said: "Anytime something like this happens, a lot of it is out of my control. God's fingerprints are all over the place. You can try to call it coincidence but 20, 30 things all had to happen at the right time for me to be here. That's why I call it a miracle. he combination of Christian piety and supposedly God-given talent goes far in America. Tim Tebow, at 24, is the most feted quarterback in the National Football League, as much for anything he has accomplished on the field for the Denver Broncos as the fact that he prepares for matches by posting Bible verses on his Facebook account. Similarly, the Hollywood preference, from Field of Dreams to Any Given Sunday, is for sport to be leavened with a heavy dose for of the miraculous. In the eyes of the moguls, Lin's tale, from couch-surfing to game-clinching, has assumed universal appeal. "I can't tell if you if we have ever seen anything like it," one PR executive said this week. "Linsane," indeed.