Amid the emotional tributes to Gary Carter here Friday, his accomplishments in baseball were an unavoidable topic.

But the memorial service for Carter, who died last week after a battle with brain cancer at age 57, also highlighted his devotion to God and his family.

The service for Carter, who entered the Hall of Fame as an Expo but who helped propel the Mets to the 1986 World Series championship, was held in front of hundreds of friends, family members and former teammates at Christ Fellowship, a large modern church resting on a palm tree-laden campus.

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The book seems to suggest that you think African-American kids have lost touch with the struggles of their forebears. Do you?

Absolutely. They came into a world where, after these battles had been fought, they have a lot more opportunities and the ability to see themselves as being able to go anywhere and do anything. We have to maintain continuity by giving them the history of what the struggle was all about….

Is the U.S. in a postracial era in professional sports?

I don’t think we’ll ever be postracial, because of the fear and anxiety of dealing with the other ”” people who aren’t like you. But the ability of racism to distort and corrode our society has become a lot less.

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Linsanity lives.

Forget the off night that had NBA fans worldwide wondering if the Jeremy Lin story was too good to be true. It’s still plenty good, all right.

The Harvard sensation was back at his whirling ways Sunday, and the stage couldn’t have been better — against the defending champions on national TV.

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Jeremy Lin is anomalous in all sorts of ways. He’s a Harvard grad in the N.B.A., an Asian-American man in professional sports. But we shouldn’t neglect the biggest anomaly. He’s a religious person in professional sports….

The modern sports hero is competitive and ambitious. (Let’s say he’s a man, though these traits apply to female athletes as well). He is theatrical. He puts himself on display….

…[Yet] there’s no use denying ”” though many do deny it ”” that this ethos violates the religious ethos on many levels. The religious ethos is about redemption, self-abnegation and surrender to God.

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In May 2010, an unsung numbers hobbyist named Ed Weiland wrote a long-term forecast of Jeremy Lin for the basketball website Hoops Analyst. At the time, Lin was a lightly regarded, semi-known point guard who had completed his final season at Harvard. But Weiland saw NBA material. He emphasized how well Lin played in three nonconference games against big schools: Connecticut, Boston College and Georgetown. He noted how Lin’s performance in two unsexy statistical categories””two-point field-goal percentage (a barometer of inside scoring ability) and RSB40 (rebounds, steals and blocks per 40 minutes) compared favorably with college numbers put up by marquee NBA guards like Allen Iverson and Gary Payton. Weiland concluded that Lin had to improve on his passing and leadership at the point, but argued that if he did, “Jeremy Lin is a good enough player to start in the NBA and possibly star.

“In the wake of Lin’s historic New York explosion, Weiland’s eerily prescient post has quickly recirculated around the Internet, as a rare example of someone who saw potential in a player who wasn’t drafted and was abandoned by two teams before getting a chance with the Knicks. Traffic rushing to Weiland’s 2010 Lin piece briefly crashed the Hoops Analyst website after Lin torched the Lakers for 38 points Friday, and his wisdom has been compared with the groundbreaking number-crunching in the baseball best seller “Moneyball,” which became a recent Hollywood movie. A tribute to Weiland’s foresight on Yahoo’s The Post Game ended with, “Brad Pitt’s on line 1.”

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The blog Hoops Analyst has crashed in the last 24 hours. Normally this wouldn’t be problematic for anyone beyond Harlan Schreiber, the site’s founder. But these are not normal times in the NBA, and Hoops Analyst had something like the Zapruder film of the basketball world: In 2010, an amateur geek named Ed Weiland published on Hoops Analyst his vision of Lin lighting up NBA arenas.

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Gary Carter, the slugging catcher known as Kid for the sheer joy he took in playing baseball, who entered the Hall of Fame as a Montreal Expo but who most famously helped propel the Mets to their dramatic 1986 World Series championship, died Thursday. He was 57.

The cause was brain cancer, which had been diagnosed last May. Carter had been treated with chemotherapy and radiation, but his daughter Kimmy Bloemers said in mid-January that new tumors had been discovered. She announced his death on her family journal at CaringBridge.org.

Carter played with intensity and flair, hitting 324 home runs and punctuating many of the ones he hit at Shea Stadium with arm-flailing curtain calls emblematic of the Mets’ swagger in the middle and late 1980s. In his 19 seasons in the major leagues, all but two of them with the Expos or the Mets, he was an 11-time All-Star and was twice named the most valuable player in the All-Star Game.

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Lin is also a born-again Christian whose fans love him as much for cultural and religious intangibles as for his ability in his sport.

In a 2010 interview with Timothy Dalrymple of Patheos.com, Lin said he was raised in the church and became a Christian in high school. In college, he played “for the glory of God.” After his career-high 38 point performance against Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, he said, “I just give all the praise to God.”

But Lin, who told Sports Illustrated in 2010 that he wants to be a pastor post-NBA, also has another intangible going for him””his Chinese-American heritage. Yes, the “Linsanity” is driven by his performance on the court, but it’s also driven by his Taiwanese descent, and the fact that he is one of a handful of Asian Americans to make it to the NBA.

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Wowowow–watch it all.

For me, as an Asian-American, the chants of “M.V.P.!” raining down on Lin at the Garden embody a surreal, Jackie Robinson-like moment. Just as meaningful to me as a Christian, however, is the way the broadcasters have hailed Lin as not just the “Harvard hero” but the “humble Harvard grad.” His teammates appear just as overjoyed at his success as he was. Both seem to be testaments to his character.

Some have predicted that Lin, because of his faith, will become the Taiwanese Tebow, a reference to Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, whose outspokenness about his evangelical Christian beliefs has made him extraordinarily popular in some circles and venomously disliked in others. But my gut tells me that Lin will not wind up like Tebow, mainly because Lin’s persona is so strikingly different. From talking to people who knew him through the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Christian Fellowship, and watching his interviews, I have the sense that his is a quieter, potentially less polarizing but no less devout style of faith.

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Check it out.

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But out on the court after the Knicks’ so-called junior varsity won its fourth straight game, a gentleman who has seen it all at the self-proclaimed World’s Most Famous Arena ”” or believed he had ”” shook his head in giddy disbelief.

“I’ve been coming here since high school in 1955,” said Cal Ramsey, leaning on a cane in the runway. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life, just out of nowhere.”

—From a New York Times article today on Jeremy Lin’s spectacular performance in last night’s game against the Los Angeles Lakers

Lin received no college scholarship offers, despite leading his Palo Alto High School team to a 32-1 record and the California championship. At Harvard, he was twice named to the all-Ivy League first team and delivered a signature 30-point performance against 12th-ranked Connecticut.

At draft time, in June 2010, Lin was again overlooked. N.B.A. teams had their doubts ”” about his defense, about his jump shot, about his ability to keep up with the league’s elite athletes….

The qualities that make Lin unique, and seemingly held him back, are now the qualities that make him a sensation. Knicks fans were clamoring for Lin before he threw his first pass at the Garden. They roar louder for his shifty layups in traffic than they do for Carmelo Anthony’s….

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Whew, after a good start to the second half that was far too close for comfort–KSH.

There were a lot of snickers last summer when Eli Manning had the audacity to inform us that he thought he was an elite quarterback.

It’s not like he beat his chest and issued a proclamation. Somebody asked him whether he thought he was an elite quarterback and he responded with a truthful answer.

“What do you expect the guy to say?” Giants coach Tom Coughlin said last night after Eli led New York to its second Super Bowl title in five seasons and also collected his second Super Bowl MVP award with a 30-for-40, 296-yard, one-touchdown performance in a 21-17, come-from-behind win over the Patriots.

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It was a very good and evenly matched game that went all the way down to the wire.

Two penalties from Wayne Rooney brought Manchester United back from the dead to draw 3-3 with Chelsea in a pulsating game at Stamford Bridge.

The hosts were riding high on a three-goal lead shortly before the hour mark, with an own goals from Jonny Evans and a David Luiz header either side of a Juan Mata stunner giving the Blues the advantage.

But United unleashed a second-half onslaught to rescue a point at the Bridge, with Rooney and Javier Hernandez the heroes for the Red Devils.

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Watch and listen to it all.

After his team was routed by the New England Patriots this month, driving the Denver Broncos out of the N.F.L. playoffs, Tim Tebow jogged off the field. Camera crews and photographers surrounded him, waiting for Mr. Tebow, the quarterback, to drop to one knee and bow his head in prayer, his famous and controversial signature gesture.

This time, Mr. Tebow did not oblige the media and the game’s tens of millions of viewers. As he vanished into the stadium tunnel, he seemingly took the polarizing issue of public religiosity away with him. The clamorous national conversation, depicting Mr. Tebow either as role model or object of ridicule, rapidly subsided.

It was a mistake all along, though, to think that Mr. Tebow was the issue. It was a case of confusing the lightning rod with the lightning. With the Super Bowl game one week away, instead of asking ourselves, “What is it about Tim Tebow?” we might better ask, “What is it about football?”

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It lasted just under 5 hours. Wow. I saw the last four sets.

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In 1 Corinthians, Paul calls attention to the vigorous training of the athlete. The Christian is challenged to follow the example of the athlete and to strive for the crown which lasts: “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training.They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize. (1 Corinthians 9:24”“27).

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics, said at a banquet in London for the members of the International Olympic Committee attending the 1908 Olympics: “The importance of these Olympiads is not so much to win as to take part”¦The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have won but to have fought well”. Those words have become effectively an Olympic motto.

What is less known is that de Coubertin was inspired by a sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral by the Bishop of Central Pennsylvania.

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What a win for them on the road against the Green Bay Packers.

What a terrific game that was, and what a wonderful win for the home team and their new coach.

Entertaining as all that has been, it has made fans and the media rethink the way they judge and cover their sports stars. Reporting that a player was including the Lord in his postgame analysis has long been widely thought of as trite and inappropriate, something to simply skip over when typing in the quotes.

Tebow’s five fourth-quarter comebacks and his four overtime victories ”” each more improbable than the last ”” and his steady, genuine, yet somehow unassuming insistence on bringing God into the conversation has forced an uncomfortable question upon those who want to make it only about what happens between the lines.

In a sports season filled with unsavory stories ”” NFL and NBA labor wars, child sex abuse scandals at Penn State and Syracuse, and a baseball MVP accused of using steroids ”” Tebow is seen by many as a sports star who really could be a role model.

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The banged up Steelers simply didn’t have enough this year; Tim Tebow played especially well.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Watch it all. What a story, what a family–KSH.

On the field, it wasn’t always pretty. In the record book, it will look beautiful forever.

South Carolina made history with its 11th win on Monday, beating No. 21 Nebraska 30-13 in a Capital One Bowl that made up for a lack of style with a dash of drama.

The No. 10 Gamecocks started slow, turned the momentum with a 51-yard Hail Mary touchdown pass to Alshon Jeffery on the final play of the first half and dominated the second half on the way to their first ever victory over Nebraska.

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