SPORTS ILLUSTRATED will survive as a print magazine (OC Tribune photo).

Shohei and the Blue Crew are lighting up Korea, every gambler and hoops fan in America is seized by March Madness and is feverishly filling out his or her brackets and Jimmy Garappolo has found another West Coast landing spot, but to me the biggest sports news of the week is something else entirely different.

Sports Illustrated lives!

Once the mental grand central depot of all thoughtful fans of the sweaty arts, “SI” has been on a steady decline into irrelevancy, both in terms of journalism and capitalism. The once-vibrant, mostly up-to-date and supremely articulate weekly journal of everything from baseball and curling seemed about to wink out as its monthly iteration shed advertising and readership like a sheepdog in the summer.

Founded in 1954 by Time Life, SI has been headed downhill for a decade. Print journalism continues its steep decline and its most recent owner – Authentic Brands – announced recently it was laying off the entire staff and retreating into its si.com website, a sure sign of the last days.

However, Minute Media – owner of sports websites The Players’ Tribune and Fansided – has stepped in and reached a licensing deal to keep the doors open and the ink flowing … hopefully not the red ink.

For those of y’all who get all your data from TV and computer screens, SI was able – for half-a-century – to keep eyeballs on paper through spectacular photography and brilliant writing. You might watch the game on Sunday morning, but you had to wait a couple of days to find out what really happened until the magazine plunked in your mailbox.

Today, the biggest part of  sports coverage – if you can call it that – consists of endless (and largely pointless ) gabfests with ex-jocks and perky coulda-been-models exchanging inane predictions and comments to fill the time between commercials. The Marx Brothers could do better.

But, of course, the question is this: does a stay of execution mean a rebirth or just a blip on its way to blinking out?  Hey, the Texas Rangers did it.