I arrived in New York this week at a palpably electric moment. My plane touched down in a rainstorm just hours before Aaron Rodgers and The Jets were set to take the field across the Hudson river in the Meadowlands, and on ESPN’s revered national stage, Monday Night Football. The Jets season opener against the Bills was the most highly anticipated game of the early NFL season: Rodgers’ decision to don the Gotham green had become a national A1 storyline, fueled in no small part by a relentless and unforgiving New York media market, a particularly well-executed season of HBO’s Hard Knocks, and our dual national obsessions: football and redemption. 

The NFL always returns to America with force, restoring structure to the weekly schedule and some semblance of a shared narrative to an increasingly polarized, compartmentalized and nicheified nation. But even by those standards this Monday night game seemed weighted with a unique and profound significance.

Bob Iger and Jimmy Pitaro had, of course, come to a similar conclusion. Earlier in the day, Disney announced that it had reached a deal with Charter to restore ESPN to the homes of the nearly 15 million Spectrum subscribers, many of them based here in New York, who had gone more than a week without access to college football and the U.S. Open, among other sporting events. And they were rewarded for their efforts: the dramatic rollercoaster of a game, which began with Rodgers’ season-ending Achilles injury and ended with Xavier Gipson’s implausible overtime walk-off punt return, was the most-watched Monday Night Football broadcast in ESPN history, averaging 22.6 million viewers across Disney’s myriad platforms.