Part of me thinks paying attention to schedule releases is ridiculous.
Sports leagues, after all, use a specific formula to determine how many times, and in which locations, teams will be playing different opponents. All that happens when a schedule is released is that those games are given a specific order.
And yet: That order matters. It's not just manufactured hype from the NBA, for instance, that leads us to be interested in the release of Thursday's league-wide 2023-24 schedule
It helps the story of a season begin to take shape. We had the facts already, the basic outline.