The View From Wisconsin

Fifteen years ago…

…no one would be screaming bloody murder when an out-of-town announcer mispronounced the name of a player on your local sports team.

…if you would have told someone that not only would there be four NHL teams in the southeastern United States, but that one of the teams would be the defending league champions – you'd have been laughed at.

…being a fan of a major pro sports team that wasn't in your area usually meant videotaping ESPN's SportsCenter and praying that they'd post more than only the results of last night's game.

…you had to hunt around to try to find a jersey from your favorite sports team, if you weren't priviledged enough to live in the same zip code.

…the only way you found out about some up-and-coming player in a sport was either via a brief comment in SI's Faces In The Crowd or by some short mention on ESPN.

…trying to manage either NCAA brackets or a Rotisserie League team (it wasn't called "fantasy sports" back then) was a long and tedious task.

…if you ran into a pro sports player in a bar, you couldn't verify that you actually met him – nor could you tell anyone except your closest buddies, who were probably there with you.

…collecting sports memorabilia meant going to card collecting shows, shilling out some cash to get someone like Pete Rose or Brent Fullwood to scribble their autograph on a piece of paper. Game-worn stuff was nearly out of the question. And forget about caps or jerseys from 20 to 30 years before; unless you knew some obscure company based on the east coast, you'd never be able to get one.

…short of actually sitting down and watching videotapes all day, there was no way you'd be able to tell exactly why your favorite sports team was tanking in close games.

…your choices for news about your favorite team's minor league system was either USA Today or (if you could actually find it on sale anywhere) Baseball America or The Hockey News.

…you couldn't find much non-sanctioned college sports info out there, short of the local newspapers in the college towns – and even that was unreliable.

…trying to find out how a particular player did in a particular situation at a previous point in his career meant having to either drag out books or magazines, or take a trip to the library to scan the microfiche, praying you could find a boxscore.

…there was no such thing as professional women's team sports.

…by the time you heard a rumor about a player on your team, it wasn't a rumor anymore.

…people were skeptical that places like Phoenix, Arizona and Miami could sustain multiple professional sports franchises.

…a newspaper devoted entirely to sports was not just a novelty, it was unsustainable.

…if there was a player or a team in your favorite sport, located in another country, you didn't find out about their performance until months after the fact.

…the idea of a player from outside of North America playing in one of the four major pro team sports was unheard of.

…only big cities like New York, Philly and LA had "sports-talk" radio stations. Other cities had only an hour or two of some ex-jock or sportscaster doing a talk show with local fans on the station that held the broadcast rights for the team.

…if you didn't have cable, you were mostly in the dark as to what was happening in the sports world.

…if you traveled a lot, you were mostly in the dark about what happened to your team while you were gone.

…the only time you ran into idiotic fans was in the concourses of the stadiums when you were heading off to your seats.