Sports Story of the Year: Leicester City

How can I say that Leicester City is the sports story of the year, especially when tonight the National Basketball Association's Golden State Warriors can become the single-season winningest regular-season team, achieving a 73-9 record if they can defeat Memphis at home?  Well, first I might explain to you insulated Americans exactly what IS Leicester City and what has transpired in the last three years...

The Leicester City Foxes (Leicester is pronounced "lester") are a soccer team in England's Premier League, widely considered as one of the top three or four leagues in the world.  Each year the 20 teams in this league play each other twice to complete a 38-match regular season, starting in the late summer and concluding the following spring, at which point the team with the best record wins the championship outright, with no playoffs.  Also, the three worst-finishing teams each year are relegated (or demoted) to the next lower league, called the Football League Championship, for the following season while that league's top three finishers are then promoted to the Premier League.  Got all that?

In the 2013-14 season, Leicester City was in that lower-tier Championship league and ran away with the title, looking forward to playing in the Premier League the following year.  But in 2014-15 they got off to a horrendous start and were mired deeply in last (20th) place in April 2015, with just a few games left and little or no hope of escaping relegation back to their previous, lower league.  Then suddenly, out of the blue they caught fire at the end of the season, winning seven games and moving up enough in the standings to be able to stay in the Premier League.  Before this year, many thought that they would continue to improve to the point where they might be good enough to finish in the middle of the standings.  However...

From the start of the 2015-16 Premier League season Leicester City, listed by oddsmakers as a 5000-1 longshot to win the title, shot to the top of the league.  Initially they had a high-powered offense led by the prolific scoring of their striker, forward Jamie Vardy.  But as the season wore on and the offense would sputter from time to time, this team's defense rose to the occasion and have, of late, been impossible to score on...they've won 5 straight matches, all of them shutouts.  Leicester City is currently 7 points ahead of second-place Tottenham (also a surprisingly overachieving team), with only 5 matches left.  Now a team will accrue 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw, and 0 for a loss.  So Tottenham still has a chance to catch up and take the title from the Foxes, which would be a major story in itself.  But should Leicester City hold on to the league's number one spot all the way to the end, it would dwarf in scope what the Mets in baseball did in 1969 when they won the World Series or the Jets winning football's Super Bowl earlier that year...