It was a year of time travel in global sports. While revisiting the past was often a downer, with the McLaren reports and Olympic retesting confirming the grand scale of recent cheating, living in the moment was routinely a joy ride.
There were times — as the buzzer-beaters and long-delayed gratification piled up — when it felt as if sport, amid the justifiable negativity, was trying desperately to prove to wavering millennials and everyone else that it was still worth saving by pulling out all the stops, all the most irresistible stories and completed quests it could muster.