That’s one of the many ways the COVID-19 pandemic carved away at the “old normal” in 2021, a year in which sports came back from the total shutdown the coronavirus triggered in 2020 — but not quite in the way we remembered. After being scrubbed in 2020, the college hoops extravaganza returned. Not every change or gain or loss in the 2021 return to sports had to do with COVID-19. After a jumbled year in horse racing, the calendar returned to normal in 2021, but the sport did not. That gave fans another way to engage in the games they love, while giving the leagues a new source of revenue and a new way to capture eyeballs.
