For the first time since the team he expected to finish his career with decided it didn’t want him around anymore, Jeremy Lin is back in New York City. After a long day of training, he meets his brother and sister-in-law (proud proprietors of "The Couch") for dinner in the West Village. And then barely thirty-six hours after arriving, it’s time for Lin to bid farewell to the city all over again—hopping in a car with me so we can make the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Bristol, Connecticut, where he’ll shoot a "This is SportsCenter" commercial (reserved only for the most pop-culturally transcendent athletes) in the morning.

More Lin:

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Lin is already exhausted by the time we get on the West Side Highway, and he’ll actually pass out on me before we successfully navigate the nightmarish traffic and drop him on ESPN’s doorstep. But for now, he’s just bummed to be leaving so soon. He misses New York, its people, its fans. "You can’t ask for a city or a fan base to embrace somebody more than they embraced me," he says. "I know it’s kind of silly to talk about it with only two years under my belt in the league, but going in before free agency, I was like, ’I want to play in front of these fans for the rest of my career.’ I really did. I really wanted to play in front of the Madison Square Garden fans for the rest of my career, because they’re just unbelievable."

On February 3, 2012, the New York Knicks lost to the Boston Celtics, 91–89. At one point, coach Mike D’Antoni put in his third-string, end-of-the-bench point guard, Jeremy Lin, to play six and a half minutes; he put up three shots and missed all three. It was the Knicks’ eleventh loss in their last thirteen games. Exactly twelve days later, Lin was on the cover of Sports Illustrated. It was a stunning and immediate ascension to total global domination. (You knew Lin had arrived when he had to deny rumors he was dating a Kardashian.)

What must it have been like in the middle of all that? What must it have been like to go from being an afterthought, a nobody, to an international icon...in a week? "What the heck? That was my main thought: What the heck?" Lin says. "People are standing outside my brother’s classroom [Lin’s elder brother, Josh, is a dental student at NYU] and showing up outside my grandmother’s house in Queens." The personal went global instantly, as well. That story about Lin sleeping on his brother’s couch in the East Village? Not only was it true—the fact became so iconic that Lin planned to appear at the All-Star Weekend lying on a proxy couch that his teammate Iman Shumpert would hurdle during the Slam Dunk contest. Lin’s sister-in-law (she’s married to Josh) was startled to see it make the news cycle. "That’s my couch! I picked out that couch!" she said, laughing. "Jeremy went from my husband’s brother who stayed with us when he was in town to us having our furniture on ESPN."

At dinner the night before we met, Lin says, he had two separate waiters tell him how sad they were he was no longer a Knick, how they weren’t sure they could follow the team anymore. (This latter sentiment, in particular, always takes him aback; the Knicks have been a New York pillar for decades, but he was only on the court for about a month.) I hope he enjoys those memories of New York, because he doesn’t have much else to remember his time by. He turned in his jerseys to the Knicks; Lin says the only Linsanity memorabilia he has are some T-shirts people gave him along the way.