That might sound like a bit of locker-room sophistry, but consider: The defining media trend of the 21st century has been the atomization of our interests, with an exponentially growing cloud of news and entertainment content enabling each individual to curate their own cultural reality. No Casey Kasem countdown, just a personalized Spotify algorithm. No Cronkite, just Tucker and Maddow. No “Must See TV,” just “Succession” viewers or “Yellowstone” viewers. For a variety of reasons, the NFL has not just weathered this, but transcended it. Football now occupies the cultural space in which misty-eyed writers once placed baseball, as a great American unifier — all the more impressive considering the cultural and technological sea changes that would now seemingly preclude such a thing from existing.

There are a slew of potential explanations for this, ranging from predictably cynical to genuinely benevolent: the extensive network of corporate partnerships that give the NFL its Big Brother-like media omnipresence; efforts to expand the sport’s reach through everything from youth sports initiatives to the legalization and promotion of sports gambling; the changes to the sport’s rules that have made the game safer and more entertaining, warding off the numerous concussion scandals that many thought would endanger the sport’s mere existence at any level.

Those are all probably necessary for football to maintain its improbably big-time footprint, but none are sufficient. Football is the last monoculture standing because it’s created its own, self-contained constellation of the micro-universes that have replaced that monoculture.