There are no shortage of year-end lists that employ metrics — unique visitors, page views, minutes spent — to measure the most popular stories of the year. The most enjoyable lists, however, are less quantifiable and divined instead by the writers themselves and what they found most rewarding.
The Times Sports staff, unleashed after the surreal pandemic-necessitated isolation of 2020, traveled the world in ’21, mining stories that took them everywhere from the living room of Clayton Kershaw to 7-Elevens in Tokyo. The following is an anthology — one per writer, listed alphabetically — of the Times Sports staff’s favorite stories from 2021, one last gift to you, our readers.
