Heather Lueke Smith practiced law in the Florida justice system for almost a decade before she went into private practice. Since starting her own firm, she has concentrated on construction disputes as well as city and county government law. Outside of the office, Heather Lueke Smith enjoys a broad range of hobbies and recreational activities. Every year, she participates in a fantasy football league.

Fantasy football is a statistics-driven competition that allows any and every football fan to take control of a team and match wits with others by virtual head-to-head competition. Developed in 1962 for sports journalists and other football insiders, the game “went public” in 1969 when one of the original players introduced it in an Oakland tavern he owned.

It caught on, but didn’t really take off because it was so labor-intensive. Every week, every player’s performance statistics had to be transcribed by hand from newspapers into an analog, handwritten spreadsheet. In addition, because fantasy football results were based on real players’ actual performance, players would scour the papers every day looking for any news that might be meaningful regarding their players’ health and probable performance in next weekend’s games. Fantasy football’s adherents were committed, but most football fans simply didn’t have the time to invest.

Fantasy football’s popularity started soaring in the 1990s, and it’s estimated that something like 28 million fans (6.5 million of whom were women) played during the 2013 season, making fantasy football a multi-million-dollar industry. The game’s success, though, isn’t due to any ingenious marketing campaign, or a slow but steady word-of-mouth effort to bring it into American households. Fantasy football owes its contemporary success strictly to the development of computers as a tool of personal convenience and productivity, the introduction of the 24-hour news cycle, and especially the Internet, where websites devoted to fantasy football spring up daily and help generate the never-ending stream of statistics that it and its fans depend on for survival.