Another reason why the McDonald's LPGA Championship at Bulle Rock is one of my favorite events to cover: Someone on the organizing committee arranged to have the final episode of The Sopranos shown on a monitor inside the media center last night.

If you think that's no big deal, check out what writers covering last night's NBA Finals game in San Antonio had to go through. Basically, they were out of luck and probably had to really hustle to find the show before they heard everything about what happened.

Even worse, they had to watch the game.

So a handful of writers and officials at the LPGA -- including our own Don Markus, who I hope doesn't mind me exposing that fact -- watched, then ran to our computers, cell phones and whatever communication we had at hand to get the Spurs-Cavs score. 49-27, late in the second quarter, we were told. That made the respective drives home safer for everybody involved, because there was absolutely no urgency in making it in time to see the second half. In fact, full disclosure, I missed all but the final minute, because when I got home, AMC had the nerve to be showing Young Frankenstein, with DVD extra-style commentary at the bottom of the screen. Sorry, you won't get any Game 2 analysis here.

This all brought a thought to mind: Sometime soon, maybe today, ratings numbers for both The Sopranos and the NBA Finals are going to become public. It will be based on sets in use, the way ratings have been judged since the time I Love Lucy was on the air. But ... at least five people watched The Sopranos on a widescreen inside a tent next to a golf course. Probably hundreds more watched in a room inside AT&T Center in San Antonio (I'm guessing some arrangements were made by the NBA, which is also very good at that sort of thing). More at the various sports events that kept people away from home until after the episode was over -- Turner Field, where the Cubs and Braves played the ESPN Sunday Night game, the Poconos, where the NASCAR race was held, and so forth. There surely were a few newsrooms that aired the show for the editors working on today's paper.

You know people had Sopranos viewing parties at homes and offices and other places, and some bars and restaurants likely showed it to people there. And, of course, it aired later on the West Coast feed, and on HBO2, and will keep on airing on the stations and definitely is on On Demand. And, finally, it was TiVo'd, so there are people who haven't watched it yet, but who bought TiVo specifically for times like this.

So how exactly is the audience for this episode really going to be measured honestly?

And, for that matter, how can anyone truly measure the audience for the NBA Finals games, or any other major sports event, for that matter? I can tell you I watched Game 1 from a sports bar in Laurel (this one, in fact; I recommend it highly, and it's owned by a couple of Morgan State graduates) with five friends. That kind of viewing is taken for granted, it's all over the place, but unless there's something I'm missing, there's no real way to count that in the ratings.

So much has changed in the way people watch TV, but the way it gets counted really has changed very, very, VERY little. (In its June 1 issue, Entertainment Weekly magazine broke this all down succinctly and fairly thoroughly.)

One reason this crosses my mind is because at this time every year, there's a huge story about how that particular year's NBA Finals ratings is down some steep percent from the days of Michael Jordan and the Bulls.

C'mon. Has the way people watch TV changed at least a little bit since 1993 (the last of the first three-peat), or even 1998 (the last of the second three-peat)? There probably is evidence to prove that the Spurs really are less of a draw than teams like the Bulls and Lakers. But raw numbers like the traditional set of TV ratings are a pretty poor way to measure this.

What's for certain is that whatever the ratings say about last night's Sopranos, the ratings didn't count the one set on which a bunch of people were watching at Bulle Rock, and whatever the Finals ratings measure, it won't measure us at the sports bar. That tells me that we shouldn't believe those numbers all that faithfully.

What's also for certain is that the Cavaliers are in completely over their heads. So who's going to measure how many people aren't going to watch Game 3?