This was cheesy. A sellout wrapped in a semi-clever package. But still a sellout.

Yesterday, April 1 … the espn.com home page seemed to have a new feature.

Streaming across the upper half of the home page was a ticker sort of concept. Moving news, right to left. Like the cable news stations use across the bottom of the screen. This had a ticker of about 10 stories. Maybe eight. Cycling through.

And they all were odd. Like espn.com had collected a sports version of News of the Weird and decided to give it prominent play.

If only. It was much more sinister.

I clicked on a story or two. At first, I wasn’t thinking about the date, and I even wondered, “has this thing been up here for a day or two and I didn’t even notice?” I know what I want on the site, and I am fairly adept at freezing those commercials espn.com throws at you, and clicking to close the pop-ups. It’s really a rather offensive site, for all that.

So, the first streamer story I clicked on was something like, “Player achieves sextuple-double. And the story was about a kid from some Massachusetts prep school who had reached double figures in six stats — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots and turnovers. It had quotes from the coach talking about how much the kid was always around the ball, but how he had really outdone himself.

Not a long story. Maybe 10 grafs. And in about the second graf from the end, we got to a quote from the kid, who was in the locker room, taking off his shoes, the sort of small detail reporters actually do sometimes include. The kid mentioned that his teammates teased him about the 11 turnovers.

Well, hmm. Kind of interesting. And at this point, I thought it might be legit. Small school in Massachusetts. Sextuple-double. Had to happen somewhere, right? Sure.

I had the day off, on April 1, and I did more than a little browsing, going back to espn.com … and I opened up a few more of the ticker-tape-type things. And somewhere around item No. 3 or so … I saw the word “Nike” … and it struck me:

“Every story I have read so far has had … Nike in it.”

Like this one.

The other thing I picked up on … was finally reading to the bottom of the item — that ital/bold type I normally don’t even see. And it read … Nike, Nike, Nike.

espn.com had sold out a banner across its top to fake April Fool’s Day stories. Got that? Fake fakery! Had sold out to Nike.

If you click on the first link at the bottom of the story, it takes you to the Nike online store. Grand.

If you click on the second, it takes you here. Where Nike happily brags about its oh-so-commercial April Fool’s Day stories.

So, yes, fairly disgusting.

I was so annoyed at it all, that I did a search for the old Sports Illustrated Sidd Finch story, from the April 1 edition of 1985. By George Plimpton. Complete fiction about a guy who can throw 160 mph, a pitcher, of course, who has been signed by the Mets. I wanted to read some non-commercial April Fool’s Day sports tomfoolery.

Anyway, that search took me here, to something called the Museum of Hoaxes, which ranks its top 100 April Fool’s Day hoaxes of all time. Sidd Finch is No. 2, by the way.

Yes, you have ads there, too, but they’re the passive, easy-to-ignore ads like we have on this site. The ones nobody clicks on, and that’s fine by me.

Anyway, I was slightly mollified. espn.com’s shameless money-grubbing led me to this other site, and some of these hoaxes are quite clever. No. 1 is pretty good, as is No.5,  if you have a journalism background. I like No. 15 too. And No. 20.

Read those and smile. You won’t be buying tennis shoes.