Welcome back to ESPN Daily's special 20th anniversary series about pardon the interruption,

the very strange sports television show that kind of changed everything.

In our first two episodes, which you can find earlier in this feat, we tracked how Tony and Mike went from newspaper guys at the Washington Post, where they once looked down on all TV people as, quote, pretty boy poodles, to ESPN, where they put on makeup and almost immediately started winning Best in Show.

Now, to be clear, Tony and Mike did not expect PTI

to be some blue ribbon industry changing program when they started it. So I wanted to know,

when did it start to feel like this whole thing was working? When I heard people talking about watching it, maybe sometimes players that are now

ex-players, and they said, dude, I'm watching the show. Probably early on when they told us how

many people were watching, and it was many more people than they told us they'd be happy with watching.

And everybody was suddenly saying, I like this show.

Even the people at the post were saying we like this show.

And so, you know, we probably looked at each other at one point.

We said, well, we were in for a dime, in for a dollar.

We might as well keep doing this for a while.

But remember here, Tony and Mike were infamous for waging these office-wide battle royal

arguments that could consume entire newsrooms. So it also seemed important from the beginning

for the co-hosts to actually host people. They both wanted visitors. They wanted house guests.

It's important to have outside voices because it's important to have outside voices in everything.

In your family life, it's important to have outside voices.

That's why people have consultants.

That's why they have people they argue with.

That's why they have people they call in and say, take a look at this for me.

What do you think?

...