The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox. Good morning! We have a live blog going for all things NFL combine, by the way. Coming up: It is difficult to spot evolution in real time, because, by nature, it is slow. One tick I have noticed in the course of writing this newsletter over the past five years: Pro athletes, by and large, are getting older. Sticking around longer. Right? Let me frame it with one of my favorite tweets: You: “I’m only 35, I have my whole life ahead of me.” Sports Broadcaster: “Here comes the oldest player in the league. He’s 32. A miracle.” — Troy Johnson (@_troyjohnson) May 19, 2024 It’s a funny tweet because the second rang so true for so long: 32 was old for a pro athlete, at least for most of my time watching sports. That’s when you started to worry about how long contracts are and how many injury reports a player has shown up on. Advertisement Today, that’s just not true. I was inspired to explore this by Katie Whyatt’s piece earlier this week, but just peep some of yesterday’s general sports news: And that’s not to mention that we just saw Lindsey Vonn return to world-beater form at 41 years old before a tragic Olympic injury. Still so, so rare. Read Katie’s story for more about how these players are achieving such longevity — and why. Maybe we’ll all be dunking when we’re 70 like Marques Johnson. On to younger folks: USA Hockey’s weird week Both the American men’s and women’s hockey teams had a beautiful week last week, leaving with gold medals from respective thrilling overtime wins against rival Canada. What ensued was a politically thorny few days, culminating in last night’s State of the Union address in Washington, D.C. Quick catch-up: Jerry Brewer wrote a strong column about how the men’s team won gold … then lost the room. More news: 📰 Find more news here 24/7. Back in 2021, Zack Meisel wrote a great story about Randy Kula, a Cleveland-area man with an extremely niche sports hobby: finding a photo of every single player who had ever played in a game for the Guardians franchise, all the way back to 1901. What started as a fun hobby became an obsession, particularly as Kula added more photos to his mental till. A total of 1,917 players have appeared for the Cleveland franchise thus far; twenty-one years ago, Kula found No. 1,916. He was missing just one: Charles William ‘Shorty’ Gallagher. This January, his two-decade quest for one picture of one player who played in one game for Cleveland, on Aug. 13, 1901, ended with a Facebook message. Zack has the full follow-up, too, published yesterday. Read it here. Never knew I’d be so invested in a guy who played one game of 1901 American League ball. Advertisement 📺 UCL: Benfica at Real Madrid 3 p.m. ET on Paramount+ Another day of Champions League knockout playoff action, with one of the most controversial matches of 2026 here. Madrid leads 1-0 on aggregate, but eyes will be more on the tension between these two after allegations of racial abuse in the first-leg match. 📺 NBA: Thunder at Pistons 7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN A tough stretch here for Detroit, the East’s best team, playing against the Spurs on Monday night (a loss) and now the defending champions tonight. Time to show some mettle. Celtics-Nuggets follows at 10 p.m. ET. 📺 NHL: Maple Leafs at Lightning