Sports Illustrated did something extraordinary when it decided that its Sports Person of the Year wasn’t a person at all but a team. And it’s hard to argue with the magazine’s choice of the Boston Red Sox for that honor.

But there’s more to this than just a team being the year’s biggest performer. The reason that it makes so much sense to make the Red Sox the Team of the Year is because 2004 was the Year of the Team.

I’ve been writing year-end columns for more than 20 years, and every year a theme emerges. Usually, that theme is directly related to the number of headlines a story line generates. But not this year.

If you went by headlines, this would be the year of steroids or the year of Kobe Bryant. Those were the big stories, the ones that launched a thousand rants. But they weren’t the essence of 2004.

What characterized 2004 was the New England Patriots being introduced at the Super Bowls not as individuals but as a team. It was the Detroit Pistons, a team without an obvious superstar or future Hall of Famer, beating the star-laden and discordant Los Angeles Lakers. It was Argentina, Lithuania and Puerto Rico teaching the U.S. Olympic Basketball Human Highlights that 12 guys who know how to play a game the right way can beat 12 guys who know how to land the best shoe contract.

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It was the U.S. women’s Olympic teams — soccer, basketball, softball — dominating their competition through consummate team play, the three teams going through the Olympics without the loss of a single game.

And finally, it was Boston’s Idiots, the Red Sox, a team whose years of misery were defined by 25 guys and 25 cabs, coming together as a gritty, scrappy, all-for-one, one-for-all outfit, Pedro-will-take-care-of-himself that brought a World Series championship to Boston for the first time since 1918.

As much as you may be distressed and depressed by all the steroid news and the brawl in Auburn Hills and the continuing parade of athletes through the nation’s police stations and courts, if you look back at who won and why, you have to feel better than you’ve felt about sports for a long time.

It started in Houston on the first Sunday in February when the Patriots did their team entrance followed by the Carolina Panthers, who also came out as a team. Other outfits had the bigger names and greater stars.

Neither the Panthers nor the Patriots had an offensive player as scintillating as Peyton Manning. Nor did either have a defender as spectacular at Ray Lewis. Nobody wrote stories about their great corps of receivers or their all-world running backs. What we talked about both going into the game and coming out of it was how this was a Super Bowl that was a testament to the enduring truth that individuals win awards and dominate the highlight films, but teams win championships.

As the Super Bowl faded from sight and memory, so, too, it seemed, did the importance of teams. It was basketball season, and what dominated the headlines was the Lakers and the increasingly acerbic relationship between Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal and Bryant’s regular trips to Colorado to attend hearings in his sexual assault case.

Not many looked at the NBA playoff brackets and said that this team from Detroit with the undersized center and a recycled point guard was going to be a contender. Rather, we wondered whether this was the year for Kevin Garnett to break through against the defending champion Spurs or the Lakers.

Most of us who get paid to pretend that we know the future figured it would be either the Spurs or the Lakers hugging the trophy at the end of the tournament. Even when Detroit prevailed in the East, we gave them as much chance to beat the mighty Lakers, who had conquered both the Spurs and T-Wolves, as you’d give a kitten of taking a lamb chop from a starving wolf.

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But it was the Pistons, with Ben Wallace taking care of the boards and Chauncey Billups running the offense and Rip Hamilton making all the big shots, not just beating a team that had three or four future hall of famers, but thrashing them in five games.

At the Olympics, if there were ever a demonstration of the reborn importance of team play, it was again on the basketball court. The individual stars that the United States send to defend what basketball fans saw as their birthright were exposed as athletes without a clue about how to play a game against teams that were truly cohesive units drilled in working together to win

The U.S. women merely emphasized the point. Dedicating themselves to their game and each other — sometimes for years — the softball, soccer and basketball teams were undefeated and gave us not a single negative headline. Dawn Staley, Lisa Leslie, Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain, Crystl Buston, Lisa Fernandez — these were stars, but they were consummate team players. And they were champions.

When the Red Sox won the World Series — their team ritual through the final eight games being a politically incorrect but bonding pre-game sharing of a small cup of bourbon — it was the perfect capstone to the year. For the first time in ages, the Red Sox were not just loaded with stars, but also loaded with togetherness. They called themselves the Idiots, and with their eclectic tonsorial tastes reminded us of bygone days when the scruffy A’s were dominating the game.

There is no argument that the Red Sox were the right choice for Sports Illustrated’s cover. They were the team of the year in the year of the team.