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Sports Fans love a cinderella story. From the 2004 Red Sox coming from down 3-0 to beat the Yankees to the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team trumping the Russians, the rule remains the same: Always root for the underdog.

Perhaps the best Cinderella story in sports today is in the press box. Since the birth of the Net, the bigfoot of Web sports has been ESPN. No one has seriously challenged it. Until now. And our plucky hero is ... Yahoo? Insert the $33 billion company's trademark exclamation point here.

Yahoo Sports was an also-ran as recently as two years ago. It lacks the media properties to woo hard-core sports fans to the Web, as Time Warner can with Sports Illustrated or Fox can with its TV and radio networks. Yet Yahoo hasn't stumbled into the glass slipper. Sports content, which draws the majority of its adherents from the highly desirable demographic of men between the ages of 25 and 49, is a gold mine. Yahoo has plotted a strategy to earn a big share of what eMarketer reported to be $548 million in online ad revenue for sports sites in 2007, a pot that's expected to grow to $1.1 billion by 2011.

So far, so good. Yahoo beat "the worldwide leader" in unique visitors in August, September, and November 2007, according to comScore Media Metrix. In the money game, according to a private Nielsen/NetRatings AdRelevance report obtained by Fast Company, both Yahoo Sports and ESPN.com generated about $80 million in ad revenue through the first three quarters of last year. (Nielsen, ESPN, and Yahoo wouldn't comment.) No wonder CEO Jerry Yang cites Sports as part of his goal of "becoming the starting point for the most consumers on the Internet."

The shift in the editorial direction at Yahoo Sports began in early 2006 when the portal hired Dave Morgan away from the Los Angeles Times to be the site's executive editor. "We only had four reporters and there wasn't a robust program of original content," Morgan says, referring to the knock on Yahoo that it only offered third-party info. "But we also had a blank canvas."

Morgan has beefed up his staff to more than 50 people, including such well-known names as boxing and mixed-martial-arts writer Kevin Iole, former Sports Illustrated NFL scribe Michael Silver, as well as former athletes such as retired NBA point guard and popular TNT analyst Kenny Smith. "Our goal is to strike an equal harmony between licensed and original content," says Jimmy Pitaro, general manager of Sports. Pitaro has extended that philosophy to Web video, creating original content, such as its refreshing "SportStream" news-and-analysis clips and "Fantasy Football Live," while also licensing highlights from all the major leagues.