Measured by sheer number of viewers, this might have been the most popular sports year in American history. More people watched the Super Bowl than ever before; the World Series had its highest ratings in a decade; the Olympics drew nearly double the number of viewers the Tokyo Games did in 2021; women’s sports have grown so dramatically that, in basketball, women are getting better numbers than the men. But I can’t help but wonder if all these successes constitute something of a blip — one we’ll look back at as a zenith rather than the start of an unstoppable upward trajectory. 2024 was a lot of things — boy, was it — but more than anything else, it was a year when the need for escapism was paramount, and people needed a place to hide their heads in the sand, if just for a little while.
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