Alex Mather was—reasonably, deservedly—celebrating when I texted him last night, hours after The New York Times announced its stunning $550-million all-cash acquisition of The Athletic. The deal was a coup for both Mather and his fellow co-founder Adam Hansmann (and a masterstroke for ubiquitous banker-to-the-stars Aryeh Bourkoff, and his deputy Alex Michael). Six years ago, Mather and Hansmann had capitalized on the disruption of the newspaper industry by snapping up many of the nation’s best local sports reporters and fashioning themselves as, in Mather’s words, “the local sports page for every city in the country.” Nevertheless, they were still burning about $50 million a year on average and appeared to be hitting a growth ceiling. And yet, they’d managed to convince the subscriber-hungry Times that their 1.2 million paying readers were worth more than half a billion dollars. It was probably the most lucrative and well-timed exit they could have hoped for.