The coronavirus pandemic placed sports journalism in a vulnerablestate, which necessitated a reconsideration of what it means toconduct sports journalism. Through the theoretical framework ofmetajournalistic discourse, the present study reports on a two-step discourse analysis of metajournalism on U.S. sportsjournalism (n= 166) published during the coronavirus pandemic.We argue that journalism vigorously defended the sportsjournalism subfield in the expectation that it would once againbecome newsrooms’economic engine. While historicallydenigrated as the“toy department,”sports journalism herereflected on this designation in a positive light: after all, aren’ttoys what bring people together? Even without live sports, sportsjournalism was still perceived as a specialty emphasizing socialcohesion.