Couldn’t we make the case that these are the most difficult titles to win in history?

Never before have teams and athletes had to reboot their bodies after a multiple-month layoff in the NBA and the NHL?

How about the mental taxation of leaving your family for months and playing inside a bubble that you couldn’t leave during a global pandemic where there was no true home court or home ice advantage even if you were a top seed?

Baseball traditionalists will scoff at the idea of this being a true World Series after a 60 game schedule, because the sport is a marathon not a sprint.

However, isn’t the degree of difficulty greater this season because in in a 60 games season there was less margin for error than ever before in a regular season?

Plus, with a playoff format that includes winning a best of three series, a divisional series, a League Championship Series and then a World Series, couldn’t it be argued that with more games and more rounds that this was, in fact, the most difficult World Series ever to win?

Ask yourself: is it harder to win the Boston Marathon or get the gold in the 200-meter dash in the Olympics? One involves stamina, conditioning and perseverance. The other involves different conditioning, training and zero margin for error where things are decided by nanoseconds.