New York sports club

No, I don't mean the one where you can work out on elliptical machines, but the conversations that have been going on everywhere in New York City over the last eleven days. It's been a crazy stretch here since Saturday, February 5.

That was the night Jeremy Lin broke out (one of my kids was there, and I was watching it on TV). If I do say so myself, I had been saying that the Knicks should play him. Not that I foresaw how it would go, but you could tell, even from a few sloppy minutes at the end of blowout games, that he is actually a point guard.

The good news in the last couple of games is that he appears to be adapting as the defenses adapt. In the Toronto game on Monday night, the other team had clearly done its homework, and come up with planned responses that included lots of double teams and beating the living daylights out of him any time he entered the lane. He struggled a bit, but then delivered the astounding final minute. Last night, Sacramento evidently expected him to try to score, so instead he passed.

Sunday, February 6, of course, was the Super Bowl. Here in our fair city, people are still smiling about it. Not just the astounding catch (again) and the amazing final-minute victory (again), but the wildly implausible parallels, which had been going on for weeks, between the current year and 2007/2008. I think of it as the happy, rather than nightmare, version of the repeating loop in the classic English chiller, Dead of Night. Sportswriter Bill Simmons, being a diehard Patriots fan, notices the same thing (as how could he not) but is considerably less enthralled:

"Like every other New England Patriots fan, I spent the hours after Super Bowl XLVI trapped in some sort of catatonic trance. It happened again? Against the same team? How could THAT happen again? This was like watching one of those lazy movie sequels — like Another 48 Hours, or The Hangover Part II — when they don't have any inventive ideas, so they overpay everyone involved and shoot a script with the same beats."