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MIAMI — This was 27 days ago, early on a Friday evening, maybe two hours before the Knicks played the Heat for the first time in 2012. Inside the chapel at American Airlines Arena, just down a hallway from the dressing rooms, a handful of supplicants had gathered to seek solace.
Udonis Haslem, a Heat forward and a regular at these 20-minute assemblies, noticed a quiet presence in the room that day, quickly figured it to be Jeremy Lin, a roster filler for the Knicks. He returned to his personal vigil. The chaplain said a few words, a few prayers, then asked around the room if anybody had any special intentions.
Haslem noticed an arm.It was Jeremy Lin’s.
“What do you want to pray for?” the chaplain asked.
“That I not get cut again,” Lin said quietly.
Haslem, recalling that day after the Heat’s practice yesterday, laughed.
“Next thing you know,” he said, “It’s ba-da-da, BA-DA-DA.”
As in, the theme song for “SportsCenter,” which the last two weeks has also been the theme song for Jeremy Lin.
“It makes you feel good, seeing a story like that, seeing a guy make his way like that especially because I can definitely relate to it,” said Haslem, who went undrafted out of Florida in 2002, whose weight ballooned past 300 pounds and ended up exiling him to France for a year before hooking on with the Heat in 2003, winning a title with them in ’06, and establishing himself as one of the franchise’s non-Big Three cornerstones.
“I only wish,” Haslem said, “that this was playing itself out with him as a member of the Heat.”
So tonight, fresh off the Knicks’ 99-82 thrashing of the Hawks last night at the Garden, Lin will return to Miami, where 27 days ago his stat line read the way so many of them had to that point in the season: DNP-CD.
Did Not Play — Coach’s Decision.
He returns as a two-week cover subject for Sports Illustrated, and if that seems like an odd honor, consider that in the magazine’s 58-year history no New York athlete — not Mantle, not Maris, not Clyde or Pearl or Messier, not Namath, not A-Rod, not Jeter or Seaver or Reggie — has ever had that honor.
All this attention isn’t doing Lin, or the Knicks, any favors, because in the hyper-competitive world of the NBA, prideful athletes feast on such attention. Deron Williams — on whose watch Linsanity began, and don’t believe for a second he wasn’t aware of that — dropped 38 on Lin on Monday, and looked more excited than if he were clinching Game 7 of the Finals in doing it.
Twenty-seven days, from tortured to target. From praying for job to being preyed upon by the sport’s greatest talents, all of them wanting a piece of the league’s new glamor boy. You could see the Heat salivating at the prospect yesterday, even if the players were careful to measure their words.
“It’s great for New York, great for the league, great for the sport if the Knicks are playing well, and thanks to Jeremy Lin the Knicks are playing well again,” said LeBron James, who acknowledged that he planned on spending his night off last night sitting in front of a television and watching all 48 minutes of Knicks-Hawks at the Garden.
And the SI covers?
“I hope he doesn’t take it for granted,” James said. “I hope he cuts them out, frames them, puts them on his wall.”
Said James’ running mate, Dwyane Wade: “It’s a league of opportunity. Guys in the league, they know when a guy can play. Now, that doesn’t mean you know a guy’s going to be a star. And what does that mean when you get a chance to do it? You hope you get a chance and make the most of it.”
Twenty-seven days after seeking a South Beach assist from a higher authority, we see how that’s turned out for Jeremy Lin so far. And if he’s now the object of the great Miami Heat’s obsession?
Well, good luck to him, and to the Knicks. And Godspeed.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com