A:  He’s probably at home in his bathrobe or doing something with friends and family besides his job. Man, what a loaded question!  While Amar’e Stoudemire’s productive performance in Game 4 of the Knicks’ first-round playoff series with Miami was highly unlikely given his self-inflicted injury, few can be surprised at Mike Woodson’s insistence that PG Jeremy Lin is unavailable, even were the series to go to a 7th game.  Few, that is, besides MSG’s Al Trautwig, who as recently as Sunday afternoon, continued to tease a Lin comeback, causing the New York Daily News’ resident Gallagher-lookalike Bob Raissman to dub Al, “a snake-oil salesman”.

“I always wondered how the Jeremy Lin movie would end. Here we go,” Trautwig said on MSG’s Game 4 postgame show. “Jeremy Lin returns for Game 5 and leads the Knicks to become the only team in NBA history to come back from an 0-3 deficit.”

The statement was absurd on many levels. No matter. The jive Trautwig was pushing is good for Garden business. It fits a pattern at the Gulag, where fantasy is sold as reality to a fan base that laps it up and a segment of the media that spreads it as if it were fact. Wiggie now creating the notion Lin can ride into Miami on his white sneakers and save the day is the last illusion left to sell this season.