Back in 1996, ESPN.com was the wild west of online sports—simple, text-heavy, and running on dial-up speeds that made every page load feel like overtime. Launched officially in April ’95 as ESPNET SportsZone before rebranding to ESPN.com in ’96, the site was basically a scoreboard and news feed with a few grainy photos squeezed onto a gray background. There were no auto-playing highlights or fantasy dashboards yet—just box scores, breaking updates, and maybe a banner ad or two if your Netscape browser could handle it. But for sports fans in the mid-’90s, checking scores online instead of waiting for SportsCenter was game-changing.