I happened to be in New York at the apogee of Lin hysteria, and I stopped into a sports store near Times Square in hopes of scoring his jersey as a Valentine’s Day present for my husband. After swimming through a chaotic but amiable crowd, despite it being near midnight, I was dismayed to find only unwanted XXXXXXXL sizes. A clerk confirmed there were no more; in fact they’d just gotten their first shipment — and it had been decimated by feral shoppers.

Lin’s appeal has been decoded for two weeks now, and much of what has been said is true: As an Asian American, my ethnic pride has me following his career when I don’t even like basketball. He went to Harvard. A handshake with a teammate involves books, glasses and pocket protectors. One signature of his game is that he passes to teammates and makes everyone better; he isn’t a lonewolf showboater. Lin not only upends the nerdy Asian stereotypes, he owns them.

Yet I also hear white males unabashedly talk about weeping while watching him play. Other friends who, like me, don’t usually follow basketball know that he had a game on such-and-such night and scored more points that Kobe Bryant. The sports-store crowd in which I was displaying my Tae Kwon Do shopper skills was decidedly multiracial, multi-generational, multi-aged. We all want our Lin.

No athlete of late — particularly an Asian American athlete — has caught our American imaginations like this. To be Lin-spired is to watch Jeremy Lin on the court and want a little bit of that for yourself — you don’t want to be him, necessarily, you want to be a little more yourself. That’s why, as opposed to the recent editorials crowing the tired, ready-made (and implicitly condescending) narrative that he “transcends” race, the reality is quite the opposite. He’s not an Asian American Tim Tebow. His appeal comes from his unapologetic owning of who he is, whether that encompasses being Taiwanese American, a baller, a Harvard grad, economics major, a Christian, a nerd. He projects his specific Lin-ness with such grace and aplomb, it’s impossible not to be a little awed by that, to want a little Lin-spiration for yourself.

As a person who shares little of the above (just the nerdiness and the economics major) with Lin, when I watch him play, something deep inside me resonates, almost as if I am the one leaping like a gazelle and whisking in a three-pointer in the nail-biting last seconds of a tied game. This is I, graceful, unpressured, even as a person who cannot tie my shoes properly if someone is watching me.

What ties me to Lin is seeing that he is doing what he is good at and exactly what he wants to be doing. Which is what we all strive to do. Watching the ferocious joy — and the peace — that suffuses his face as he plays, this is the same feeling I have when I, a professional writer, am writing a great sentence. Flannery O’Connor, when asked why she writes, explains, “because I’m good at it.” What is life if not to find our purpose, our skill, pursue it, and to go for broke, as Jeremy Lin has done?

This week, the bloom is slightly off the rose. Not for Lin — he’s still on fire, still passing to his teammates. But deeply entrenched anti-Asian sentiments that lurk beneath the tectonic plates of society have to burp to the surface at some point (can we take a moment to remember that in the wide swath of American history, Japanese Americans were the only group ever to be interned on the basis of race/ethnicity?). There was ESPN’s sad and sadly predictable straight-from-the-bullies’-playbook “Chink in the Armor” headline about Lin done twice, both on its web site and spoken by an anchor. There was FoxSports.com’s Jason Whitlock’s “Some lucky lady’s gonna feel a few inches of pain” tweet, MSG’s airing the image of Lin’s head coming out of a fortune cookie, sportswriter Buzz Bissinger’s ingenious idea that Lin and Michael Vick should start a dog-meat (“Vietnamese-style”) restaurant, and the seemingly positive but still racially based “AMASIAN!” New York Post’s headline (just try substituting any other racial/ethnic group in there and see how that feels).

But ironically, these events have only strengthened the Jeremy Lin magic. He gracefully forgave the ESPN commentators, accepting their explanation of an “honest” mistake (while to me, it sounds just like my bully claiming she had amnesia during junior high and thus could not remember bullying me). Perhaps even more importantly, ESPN took it seriously, fired the headline writer and suspended the commentator. This is a seismic change for Asian America. It was in 1982 when Vincent Chin, a young Chinese American out for his bachelor party in Detroit ended up dead, pelted by racial epithets, his head bludgeoned by a baseball bat by some out-of-work autoworkers who were mad at Japan (“It’s because of you … that we’re out of work!”). The two murderers served no time, and were fined $3,000. It is easy for white males like Buzz Bissinger to say racial epithets are no big deal, that Lin continues to play well despite them — but racial epithets are only a verbal expression of the poison that exists inside.

I don’t necessarily feel ESPN hustled to punish the “Chink in the Armor” perpetrators out of a sense of racial justice, but even if not, Jeremy Lin, with his talent, popularity and his humanity has forced the people who cheer him on to acknowledge that he’s a person, as opposed to the way Asian Americans are so frequently seen as Wesley Yang wrote in New York magazine last year: “a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.”

I endured months of racial bullying, two girls to my one.  It wasn’t until some “tough” girls took it upon themselves to stop the bullying, that I realized how pernicious my internalizing of the “ching-a-ling” trope. I thought I was ignoring the bullies, but what I was doing was not defending myself. By their action, the tough girls showed me I was worth defending.  Just yesterday, as I have been continuing to muse publicly on the sad spectacle of racism following in the wake of Jeremy Lin’s rise, I received an angry note from a white man saying “Be like Jeremy Lin and GET OVER IT!”  Now, I can tell him, yes, I try, but somehow I just can’t get over racism. Or having white men telling me how I should feel.

But perhaps Lin-spiration can help us see we are all special selves, worthy of nurturing, cheering on, and defending. Indeed, it might take you from thinking, “…I wish I were a baller… I wish I were taller…” to a place where you might find a little more joy in being yourself, just a little bit better.

Here is Brooks’ first paragraph:

Jeremy Lin is anomalous in all sorts of ways. He’s a Harvard grad in the N.B.A., an Asian-American man in professional sports. But we shouldn’t neglect the biggest anomaly. He’s a religious person in professional sports.

Here is the next sentence:

We’ve become accustomed to the faith-driven athlete and coach, from Billy Sunday to Tim Tebow.

Haha OK. This is the point where you hit “select all” and then “delete” and start your column again. Brooks must’ve started this thing like 10 minutes before his deadline. (No time to edit it!)

So, yes, a “religious person in professional sports” is like the least anomalous thing in the world, besides maybe “a racist comment under a YouTube video.” Or “an old white guy in political punditry.” (Also, minor note, but: I think there’s actually a decent number — enough to make Lin not particularly “anomalous” — of prominent Asians and Asian-Americans in professional sports, unless you’re only defining “Asian-American” as “of East Asian descent” and you’re only counting the “big four” leagues as “professional sports.” And you’re not really counting baseball.)

While Lin’s Christianity is obviously of great importance to Lin, it honestly has barely anything to do with what made him an instant superstar, except for when hacks want to compare him to Tim Tebow, which is dumb, because Lin is suddenly famous because he’s really good at his sport while Tebow’s whole shtick is succeeding despite being awful at being a quarterback. (If Lin had been a college superstar and high draft pick who was famously inept at the fundamentals of his position, the Tebow thing would be an accurate comparison, but Lin is in fact the opposite of that.)

Having contradicted his own faulty premise five sentences into his column, Brooks rambles on about how he has noticed that being good at sports and being pious is sort of contradictory, because being good at sports doesn’t involve much “humility” or “self-abnegation.” Then we have some boilerplate theological musings, about how sports is like modern society and how Abrahamic religious values contradict modern cultural values, especially regarding individual achievement. (YAWN.)

But even while grappling with the tension between religious values and contemporary cultural values, which is basically well within Brooks’ wheelhouse, he demonstrates a hilarious misunderstanding of sports, and what sports are “about,” because Mr. Brooks has been spending far too much time in his cloistered elite liberal media ivory tower munching on brie and arugula and not enough time among Real Americans in their “Sporting Taverns” watching “The Big Game” over a pint of mass-market domestic lager.

For many religious teachers, humility is the primary virtue. You achieve loftiness of spirit by performing the most menial services. (That’s why shepherds are perpetually becoming kings in the Bible.) You achieve your identity through self-effacement. You achieve strength by acknowledging your weaknesses. You lead most boldly when you consider yourself an instrument of a larger cause.

I could be wrong, but “consider yourself an instrument of a larger cause” is basically step three of “how to be good at team sports,” after “be gifted physically” and “practice a lot.” (And acknowledging your weaknesses? Like when Magic would spend the off-season practicing “the weakest part of his game” until he improved it?)

The “two moral universes” of religion and societal achievement may be “irreconcilable” — I am not a religious person and hence don’t care — but that has very little to do with Jeremy Lin, or basketball, or politics, which Brooks for some reason brings up in the last paragraph, because he wants to pretend this column has been about something other than extended free-associative riffing on the fact that a famous person is religious.

In conclusion, the New York Times should probably consider having someone take a quick glance at David Brooks’ columns before they publish them.