No ‘One Shining Moment,’ no Bill Raftery, no Cinderellas. How one writer feels lost without March Madness.

“There’s no reflective surfaces when you’re climbing. You’re just who you are.”

It has been a dozen days since the shocking death of the Los Angeles Lakers star. How do we talk about Kobe and his legacy on and off the court?

Competitive sports can mean professional and financial success — if they don’t compromise your mental health first. ‘Cheer’ and ‘Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez’ show how athletics can hurt as much as they can heal.

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in sports writing.

“I think a good way to describe my depression is an inability to feel happiness. It’s just this gray zone. I have this beautiful life that I can’t appreciate.”

“She no longer feared death because she could hold it in her hands at any time.”

The West Coast may have invented skateboarding, but imaginative New Yorker Tyshawn Jones keeps pushing the limits of what this slab of wood can do.

Twenty-five years ago, tennis lost Saint Vitas.

Do you want reliable California breaks with reliable California crowds, or are you ready to take your chances in frigid Irish water where you’ll share waves with no one else?

As a high schooler and new mom, Jane Rubel didn’t consider herself a feminist. She just knew that if husbands and fathers were eligible to play high school basketball, she should have been, too.

Women still aren’t treated equally at Wimbledon.

Both franchises led the NBA’s international expansion, and to stand out in the hockey-crazed country, the teams would need impressive logos and colorways to break through, but no one expected a red raptor or a grizzly bear outlined in Haida trim.

Why do people — mostly men — want to throw axes and dress like lumberjacks?

Aimee Trepanier was proud to showcase the pose that started her 1993 gymnastics floor routine in a billboard ad off I-15 in Salt Lake City. But when Utahns looked up, that’s not what they saw.

Longreads editors discuss stories in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Kotaku, and The Globe and Mail.

Billie Jean King once tried to find a sustainable business model for feminist sports coverage. Then women’s fitness tried to revive the swimsuit model.

Somehow, implausibly, against all the odds, I became the youngest person and first woman ever to win the Mongol Derby. What made me so sure I was ready, when I was totally unprepared?

An obscure character was a stand-in for the creator of Peanuts when he fell in love with tennis during the sport’s boom in the 1970s.

Three decades ago, Becky Smith wanted to become jai alai’s first woman pro. Now the sport can’t make a comeback without her.

Dan Stoddard believes there is room in the NBA for a 42-year-old rookie.

She bounded up a mountain humans can only slog up, and she’s the second-best dog in the world (after your dog, obv).

Swimmer Morgan Stickney opted to amputate her leg below the knee to get off of opioids and get back in the pool after a seemingly innocuous foot injury and the ensuing complications left her in pain.

Jacqueline Alnes shares 10 pieces that examine sports and mental health.

As a child, Tom Junod was his dad’s tout. He studied the gambling tip sheets for the only acceptable offering he could give his father: a line on a win.

How the Toledo Troopers, the most dominant female football team of all time, met their match.

Thessaly La Force hangs out with the lonesome, racquet-smashing Frenchman.

Inside the Rise and Fall of the Pillow Fight League

“You see that you can never go back. And with this knowledge a peculiar grief descends.”

For author Jaclyn Gilbert, revising her writing is much like doing the same running loops over and over, to the point where she doesn’t have to think about where she’s going anymore.