The BattleHawks surged into town in 2020 amid a fan frenzy reminiscent of when the Steamers burst onto the scene in 1978 and quickly became so popular that they routinely were outdrawing the Blues, who had been around for more than a decade.

The B-Hawks also were wildly successful, leading the XFL in attendance and television ratings before their inaugural season — and the entire league — was KO’d at its intended midpoint by the coronavirus pandemic. They ceased operations.

Despite a roster full of mostly unknown players, the team did remarkably well in television viewership. And “remarkable” might be an understatement.

St. Louis was (and still is) the nation’s 23rd-ranked market, the lowest-ranked of the XFL’s eight metropolitan areas in 2020. But the Gateway City not only led the league in average home attendance, 28,541, but also was No. 1 in television ratings.

The head-turning numbers in St. Louis went deeper. The previously unknown B-Hawks (can you still name even three players who were on the roster?) drew the best rating of any of the major winter sports teams in the region on four of the five weekends in which they played. And they were No. 2 the other time. All those clubs (Blues hockey as well as Missouri, St. Louis University and Illinois basketball) had been around for more than half a century, and the Blues were coming off their only Stanley Cup championship season.

The Hawkers also out-drew Cardinals spring training telecasts.

In fact, the telecasts of the B-Hawks' five games were seen in an average of 6.7% of homes in the market. Before last season, the Cardinals had not surpassed that figure since 2018 for their local telecasts. And the Blues never have come close to approaching that for their local TV package. Of course, those teams play many more games than did the ’Hawks, who took the field just once a week and were a bit of a novelty act. Even though it certainly is not an apples-to-apples comparison, it still is an interesting one.

Before the league shut down in mid-March that year, numbers were expected to surge even higher. The Los Angeles team was up next to play in St. Louis; and even though the LA Wildcats had nothing to do with the Rams, owner Stan Kroenke or even the NFL, St. Louis football fans were ready to take out their venom over Kroenke moving the Rams back to Los Angeles after the 2015 season. They also wanted to show that the town is a football city.

The game was headed toward drawing a crowd in excess of 40,000 — perhaps well more than that — and was likely to pull a large audience on television. The game would have been shown nationally on Fox and Kurt Krueger, general manager of local affiliate KTVI (Channel 2), estimated that 10-12% of homes in the market would have tuned in.

But everything went kaput.

Since they last played, the now-revived Battlehawks have dropped the capital H from the middle of their name. Will the lowercase version be lower rated on TV?

It will be a tougher challenge to regain the magic, as the local sports calendar will be more crowded with the debut of the much-ballyhooed St. Louis City team in Major League Soccer coming in Week 2 of the XFL schedule. But there won’t be any head-to-head competition on conventional television. While all XFL games will be shown on TV networks (ABC has the Battlehawks’ opener, at 2 p.m. Sunday when they play in San Antonio), only a handful of MLS matches will be carried on a traditional TV. The vast majority are streaming only on Apple. City appears on an established television network only three times, the first when FS1 has its match on May 20 — the week after the XFL title game is scheduled to be played.

The Battlehawks’ opener is their only game set to be shown on over-the-air TV, and KDNL (Channel 30) general manager Tom Tipton is looking for a solid rating on his station.

“Advertisers were very interested,” he said. “It sold out quickly. We expect it to do well. It would be nice to have some bad weather" to keep people inside.

That does not seem likely. The forecast calls for a sunny afternoon with the high near 60 degrees. Nonetheless, Tipton is on the B-hawks bandwagon.

“I wish we had more” Battlehawks telecasts, he added. “People want to watch football, and when they’ve got some skin in the game they like it.”

FX cable shows Games 2-3 plus two others. ESPN or ESPN2 have the rest of the team’s 10 games.

The 2020 BattleHawks schedule was played in a relatively soft part of the sports TV calendar, starting just after the NFL season ended. The season was abruptly halted before the XFL would have faced much stiffer TV completion — the NCAA Tournament, the beginning of the MLB season, the Masters golf tourney and the start of the NHL and NBA playoffs. The XFL is set to go head-to-head with all those entities this year.

Nationally, XFL ratings had been declining in 2020 even without the added viewer distractions. And this year, there will be another spring pro football league. The USFL, which played last season, kicks off its new schedule on April 16. That is on the penultimate weekend of the XFL season.

Also, there is no Los Angeles team in this year’s version of the XFL for St. Louisans to hate. And this time, the league has ties to the NFL, which could put off some fans. Finally, all XFL teams now are based in the Dallas area and travel to games in their “home” cities. Much of the B-hawks’ success the first time around, when there was no such league hub, was centered on accessibility to players and team personnel — people who made many public appearances to drum up support. That volume won’t be possible with the team about 650 miles away during the week, and although there are about a dozen local staffers, no local point man is pumping up interest to the degree Kurt Hunzeker notably did the last time.

The XFL won’t talk now about ticket sales, but the Ticketmaster website shows that there are many remaining for the Battlehawks’ home opener at 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 12 against the Arlington (Texas) Renegades.

The team has no local radio deal, as was the case in ’20.

“We engaged the local radio stations who indicated conflicts with their existing commitments,” XFL vice president of communications Jeff Altstader said. “The XFL will continue to explore options in 2024. All of our games will be broadcast from a simulcast of the ESPN feed on Sirius/XM” radio.

Let Round 2 of the Battlehawks’ battles begin.

As expected, Bally Sports Midwest’s parent company missed an interest payment of approximately $140 million it owed this week for its rights to 14 MLB teams — including the Cardinals.

Diamond Sports Group, a subsidiary of Sinclair Broadcasting, now is in a 30-day grace period that could lead to it filing for bankruptcy and possibly lead to chaos as to where games are televised.

“We are prepared no matter what happens with respect to Diamond to make sure the games are available to fans in their local markets,” baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said.

It is possible those contracts would be terminated. If that happens, Manfred said “we would do is we would produce the games, we would make use of our asset with the MLB Network to do that, we would go directly to distributors, Comcast, Charter, the big distributors, and make an agreement to have those games distributed on cable networks,” he said. “We would also be seeking flexibility on the digital side so that, when you look at MLB.TV, you could buy your out-of-market package like you always had but have the option to buy ... in-market games, something the fan has never had before, which I see as a huge improvement for fans.”

Also in the Sinclair portfolio are 12 NHL teams, including the Blues, and 16 NBA clubs.