Granted, Tony X wasn’t the biggest story of the 2016 NHL playoffs. However, he certainly provided one of the most entertaining hockey stories of last spring.

While sports fans will forever debate which major sport is the most fun to watch, few can question that pro hockey truly comes alive in the playoffs. The race for the Stanley Cup is fast-paced, hard-hitting, and constantly exciting.

Related: Instant Replay: Is It Helping or Hurting Sports?

Which is something that Tony X, a native of the St. Louis area, learned for himself last spring. Searching for the St. Louis Cardinals baseball game, he happened on the St. Louis Blues hockey game. Although Tony X (real name: Anthony Holmes) knew essentially nothing about hockey, he suddenly became enraptured.

His fervor, captured on Twitter (under his handle @soIoucity), became fodder for tens of thousands of retweets and plenty of news stories:

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Virtually overnight, the guy’s Twitter following exploded from 1,600 to over 92,000. (It currently stands at a respectable 75,000-plus.) He was interviewed on “Good Morning America,” received great seats to the Blues playoff game, and was even invited to the NHL Awards in Las Vegas. (Sadly, he missed his flight.)

“Hockey never stops. It just never stops.”

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As the nascent hockey fan told The St. Louis Dispatch: “Hockey got pretty exciting real quick. It was just nonstop action — it was like I was almost having a panic attack every time somebody shot at the goal. Football is exciting, but after every play they take a break. Hockey never stops. It just never stops.”

In the process, Tony X became a celebrated example of what’s been happening a lot in recent years: People are tuning into hockey on television and realizing how thrilling it is. That’s particularly true during spring’s NHL playoffs, which are going on right now.

Related: Baseball Could Stand to Speed Things Up a Bit

For such an old-school game, it appears to owe its new fan base to something relatively recent: the massive popularity and greater affordability over the past several years of very large, high-definition televisions.

It’s true that HDTV in general has been around for a while now, but only recently have extraordinarily large HDTV sets become affordable for virtually any budget. An enormous 65-inch HDTV with 1080p resolution (the sharpest picture short of truly crystal-clear 4K) is available for less than $700 on Best Buy’s website. You can buy a 49-inch, 4K television for less than $500.

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And no sport has benefited from the high-definition revolution more than hockey, as Aaron Gordon eloquently noted for the Sports on Earth website in 2014: “The difference was akin to wearing glasses for the first time. However, hockey in HD … didn’t just bring the game into focus; the blind could now see.”

Not only were older televisions smaller, but traditional, standard-definition sets used a 4:3 ratio that cut off large portions of the action on the left and right. Even on a relatively large TV, standard definition left the puck virtually invisible to viewers.

Imagine trying to follow a football or basketball game when you can’t see the ball.

Imagine trying to follow a football or basketball game when you can’t see the ball — or even reasonably intuit where it might be. That was the state of televised hockey for a long time.

“Back [then], watching hockey from home was a guessing game,” Gordon wrote. “HD broadcasts have so fundamentally transformed hockey that, if I didn’t know any better, I would think the NHL had a hand in inventing it.”

The problem with hockey was so serious that, two decades ago, Fox Sports infamously tried to remedy it with technology. FoxTrax, better known as the “glow puck,” created a blue glow around the puck, along with bright trails to indicate the velocity of shots, when viewed on TV. It was broadly ridiculed and discontinued after one season.

Related: Take Me Out to the (Really Expensive) Ballgame!

“For everything the glow puck … got obnoxiously wrong, it did solve a fundamental flaw with the sport: You couldn’t see the [darn] puck,” Gordon wrote. However, he noted, it alienated “existing fans with a kitschy, obtrusive graphic while failing to attract new viewers in large enough quantities to make up the difference. Where the glow puck failed, HD came to hockey’s rescue.”

“Where the glow puck failed, HD came to hockey’s rescue.”

It would be overstating the matter to claim pro hockey has suddenly ascended to a revered position among American viewers. It’s still the most popular sport in Canada and many eastern European countries — but it’s yet to reach those heights here.

There are many reasons for that. For example, extreme sports and eSports (video games) have stolen away the attention of many younger viewers. Also, the NHL hurt itself massively with a series of lockouts, including a shortened season in 2012-13 and a “lost season,” with no games played in 2004-05.

Related: I’m a Hockey Mom – Lord, Help Me

It doesn’t help that the NHL season goes head-to-head with the NBA, right down to playoffs most often occurring simultaneously, as they are right now. Viewers essentially need to choose one over the other. It’s also harder to get young people to play hockey, thanks to expensive equipment and the relative scarceness of ice-hockey rinks in many areas.

But hockey does have a way of grabbing sports fans when they give it a chance on TV, particularly during the playoffs. As Gordon noted, “The NHL has a legitimate argument for the most unpredictable and cardiac-inducing playoffs in sports, a two-month-long frenzy of nightly action.” That’s something everyone can now actually see and enjoy.