NBA

Judging Jeremy never-ending journey for Knicks guard

The challenge is posed differently across professional sports, but the cold, cruel truths it explores are always the same. Can the kid pitcher with the big arm get anyone out? Can the guy with a cannon off the tee make a putt with money on the table? Different words, same question:

Good enough, or not?

Jeremy Lin has cleared many hurdles since he first fell out of the sky and into the planet’s consciousness a month and a half ago. There was that initial surge, sure, when it seemed he had made a Joe Hardy deal with the man downstairs even as he heaped praise on the man upstairs. There was the night he outdueled Kobe Bryant, the day he outdid Jason Kidd.

There was a night in Milwaukee, after the primary push was over and he’d been humbled a few times, when he found his legs and his touch again, tried in vain to will the Knicks past the Bucks but proved that he is more than a product of hype, that at the end of the day he really can be a useful point guard at worst, a very good one at best.

WOODSON SUCCEEDING AS D’ANTONI’S REPLACEMENT BY REINING IN KNICKS

WALSH ‘LOVES’ WAY WOODSON WORKS

And then there was Saturday night in Indianapolis, three days after his alleged enabler, Mike D’Antoni, quit, two days after Mike Woodson had all but declared Lin a supporting player — at best — who would be serving at the pleasure of the team’s stars.

Yet there, in the fourth quarter, Amar’e Stoudemire was on the bench and Carmelo Anthony was serving — willingly, by the way — as a supporting cast member as Lin took a small Knicks lead against the Pacers and kept expanding it by driving, by dishing, by looking for his own shot, by reaching back a couple weeks and delivering a vintage Linsanity effort as the Knicks pounded the Pacers, 102-88.

“We dug down today,” Lin would say later. “All of us did.”

Here’s the thing though: Even as Lin was providing the Knicks with the energy and the offense to win a third straight game, even as he was electrifying the Pacers crowd and drawing his own share of arena-rattling roars, there was a small gaggle of NBA scouts sitting behind the baseline who were, to be kind, unimpressed.

“Still a D-League player,” one of them said.

“Nothing special,” said another.

Look, scouts are the forgotten warriors of the NBA, pounding the road with their laptops and their notebooks, charting plays, meticulously turning squiggles and arrows and letters on a computer screen and a legal pad into strategies that the home office can employ on some future night. It is a thankless role. And a good scout’s eye is often as trusted as any voice in any organization.

So it’s hard to just dismiss commentary like that. Most scouts know what they’re talking about. They’ve watched more basketball than any 40 of the most rabid hoops junkies you know. It’s their life. It’s their livelihood.

And they still think Jeremy Lin is a D-League player?

On one hand, it makes it easier to understand the Lin backstory, undrafted, released twice, sent to the D-League a couple other times, undiscovered and unused even by D’Antoni, who is supposed to be the Dalai Lama for point guards, until he was absolutely, positively out of options.

And on the other hand, it makes you wonder what, exactly, Lin needs to do to be viewed as a legitimate NBA point guard, unburdened by the extremes tugging him on one end (skeptical scouts, cynical fans, point guards across the league who relish the idea of treating him like a piñata) and the other end (the unchecked adoration that stalked him for a full month, and which still pops up in arenas, like at the Fieldhouse the other night) whenever he’s playing well.

“I think it was a little crazier here than it normally is,” Lin said. “That’s cool. I didn’t know I had any fans in Indiana.”

Well, he had some. But he also had — has — detractors, prominent ones, who still question, and will question, what they’re seeing and what he’s doing. You wonder what he has to do to impress them. If he ever can. And if it really matters.

mike.vaccaro@nypost.com