'You mean I can see matches from every round, for the whole week?'

WATCH: Over the last 20 years, Tennis Channel has been home for the content you can't get anywhere else.

There are always plenty of reasons to live in New York City. Back in 2003, though, there was an under-appreciated fringe benefit to being a Gotham dweller: You could get The Tennis Channel—the name started with a “the” in those early days—on a Time-Warner Cable sports tier.

That wasn’t true yet for much of the tri-state suburbs 20 years ago, and it quickly created a divide at the Manhattan offices of Tennis Magazine. If you lived in the city and paid an extra fee of $4 a month, like me, you suddenly had access to the ATP and WTA tours in a way that no U.S. tennis fan ever had before.

No more struggling to follow the early rounds from Monte Carlo or Acapulco or Stuttgart or Shanghai by staring at the scores on your computer screen and hitting the refresh button over and over. No more squinting to see the results in agate type in the local sports section the next morning. No more waiting through the week to catch a glimpse of, say, the Italian Open final, tape-delayed and cut to fit a two-hour ESPN time slot. No more accepting the fact that the pro game would vanish from sight for months at a time, as it traveled to Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America.

I remember thinking, on the first day of Monte Carlo in 2003 or 2004, “You mean I can see matches from every round, for the whole week?” At the time, this was was a mind-blowing concept for an American fan watching a European tournament not called Wimbledon or the French Open. A new, globalized tennis-viewing universe had opened up, as we were granted extended access to some of the sport’s most storied venues for the first time. Seeing the tennis fans of Rome was like meeting distant family members for the first time.

If you worked in the offices at Tennis in those days and lived outside the city, you had to sit idly by as people like me started to talk about players you hadn’t yet heard of, and matches and tournaments you might not have even known were going on.

In 2004, I raved, to mostly deaf ears, about an obscure but glorious third-round duel from Monte Carlo between Rainer Schüttler and Lleyton Hewitt. A month later, I gave a blow-by-blow of Amelie Mauresmo’s third-set-tiebreaker win over Jennifer Capriati in the Rome final to a jealous WTA-fanatic co-worker. In 2005, I reported back from my TV set on a changing-of-the-guard week in Rome: While 35-year-old Andre Agassi was making a last-hurrah run to the semifinals, 18-year-old Rafael Nadal was winning his first title there, in a monstrous five-hour final over Guillermo Coria that was built for Tennis Channel’s no-time-limits programming. In 2006, I regaled my colleagues with descriptions of Nadal and Roger Federer’s even-more-monstrous final at the Foro Italico. If you didn’t have TC, you were missing out on the emergence of a new generation of ATP stars.

Of course, the network wasn’t all Rafa-Roger epics. I also watched a lot of Vince Van Patten playing paddle tennis by the beach, followed the racquetball tour from one health club to the next, and savored the occasional sighting of a squash or badminton event. There were no studio shows or travel features that I can remember, and it took a few years for the network to start covering both pro tours year-round, let alone become the rights-holder at Roland Garros.

The advent of Tennis Channel happened at the same time as three other, similar developments that changed the way we view the sport. The first was streaming, which gave us access not just to every tournament, but to any court we wanted. (Tennis Channel's TC Plus streaming app debuted in 2014.)

The second development was social media, which was perfect for a sport like tennis, whose fans are spread around the world, but who don’t cross paths very often in real life. The Internet gave us a chance to gather en masse for the first time.

The third development was the rise of the all-surface, all-season superstar. Unlike previous generations of men’s champions, Federer, Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka were as proficient on clay as they were on faster courts, and determined to win everywhere. That had always been the case on the women’s circuit, but in the 2010s Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova made a point of improving their clay games and going all-in on their Roland Garros preparation each spring.

Put year-round access, social-media communities, and all-surface commitment from players together, and you got…what, exactly?

Tennis hasn’t become higher-profile, necessarily, or more mainstream, or a rival to soccer or the NFL. It has remained a niche sport, but its niche has been strengthened. For most of this century, tennis has felt like it has existed in a pleasant, stable, globe-circling bubble of it own. The sport doesn’t make headlines, or appear on network TV, or grab the attention of the general public often in the States. But that’s fine, because those of us who want to watch can watch more than we ever could before. The players we see from week to week and city to city have largely stayed the same during that time, and have come to seem like family. It’s a family that, unlike virtually every other sport, includes men and women.

Tennis in 2023 can feel like a refuge, a theater we can enter any time of year, with characters we can follow and other super-fans we can talk to. What happens there may not matter to everyone, but it matters to us. It’s a theater and a world that Tennis Channel was instrumental in building.