The Jeremy Lin story jumped the shark this week when a “Baseball Tonight” host on ESPN tried to draw some idiotic comparison between the New York Knicks guard and the perennially pathetic Pittsburgh Pirates while interviewing Manager Clint Hurdle.

The connection had something to do with Hurdle once having been offered an academic scholarship to Harvard and what a quaint coincidence this was, since that’s the school Lin is from.

Enough already. Yes, Lin is a great story, arriving from the NBA equivalent of nowhere to star on Broadway. There’s a movie in there somewhere, although Hollywood surely would have rejected such a script just a few weeks ago when Lin occupied the end of Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni’s bench, not yet the season-saving player he would become.

The Knicks haven’t been this fortunate since the NBA rigged the draft lottery and handed them Patrick Ewing when the sport was on life support and needed a good team in New York. And make no mistake. Lin is barely a hiccup on “SportsCenter” if he’s doing this with the Kings, the Cavs, the Grizzlies, the Hornets and most of the other teams not located in the Big Apple.

OK, I am rooting for Lin, but not because he’s an undrafted Asian-American from an Ivy League school who’s fought like heck to get himself noticed. While all those aspects of his story are laudable, I’m rooting for him to help the Knicks become a threat to the Miami Heat in the East.

If Lin can keep a ring off LeBron James’s finger (until King James comes back to Cleveland in a few years and wins one, of course), I’ll buy a poster of him and hang it in my living room.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2408 or smcclelland@ DaytonDaily News.com.