Super Bowl 58: How Las Vegas fell in love with big sport

Sign up for notifications to the latest Insight features via the BBC Sport app and find the most recent in the series here.

"Ten years ago, I would not have seen myself sitting here for a Super Bowl. You really have become Sports Town USA."

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was not the only one who did not envisage Las Vegas becoming the new frontier of American sports.

For decades, the idea of bringing major league teams to Sin City seemed taboo. In 2003, the NFL even decided that a television commercial for Vegas - tagline 'what happens here, stays here' - was too unsavoury to run during the Super Bowl coverage.

But the biggest game in American sport will be held on the Strip for the first time this Sunday and, aptly, it took a big bet from a high roller to spark the city's latest transformation.

An ice hockey team, based in the desert, was always a long shot. Vegas then suffered a seismic tragedy just days before the new team's first game.

But the community and the players rallied together to defy the odds and show that team sport can survive and even thrive, in Vegas.

Sport first came to Vegas in the 1950s, with boxing identified as another form of entertainment to supplement gambling and lure more punters into its casinos.

A string of world championship fights helped Vegas become the boxing capital of the world in the 1960s, with the image later enhanced by WWE and UFC contests coming to town.

Vegas has played host to annual golf and tennis competitions, along with various motorsport events, but team sports struggled to get established.

Several minor league American football teams tried and failed. With names like the Cowboys and the Outlaws, they harked back to when mobsters transformed Las Vegas from a frontier town into a glitz-and-gambling oasis.

But playing at unsuitable venues miles from the Strip, all had poor attendances and lasted no more than a handful of years before folding or relocating.

Although the major leagues held occasional exhibition events in Vegas, for a long time the city's only sporting success story was tennis star Andre Agassi, whose family moved there, eight years before he was born, in 1962.

Agassi's father - who boxed for Iran at the Olympics before moving to the United States and taking a job at Las Vegas' Tropicana casino as a waiter - was typical of the many 'transplants' that make up the local community, relocating for jobs in the entertainment industry and working unconventional hours.

That heavy schedule and variable pay packet makes it difficult to find the time and money to follow a sports team.

In 1962, the Vegas population was about 110,000. When Agassi won his first Grand Slam at Wimbledon in 1992 it was about 800,000. By 2014, it had shot up to 2.2 million.

A Texas-born businessman sensed something had changed and an opportunity had arisen. He was ready for go all-in on bringing a major league team to Vegas.

Sports betting has long been legal in the state of Nevada, but Las Vegas' historic reputation for corruption and organised crime, made the four major leagues - American football, basketball, baseball and ice hockey - wary of how the integrity of their matches might be affected or perceived.

They were also unconvinced the Vegas market was big enough to a professional team.

Billionaire Bill Foley felt it was, and in December 2014 the National Hockey League (NHL) granted him permission to stage a season-ticket drive for a potential Las Vegas franchise and test his hunch. The target was to get 10,000 fans to stake money on a seat from which to watch a future team.

Within 36 hours Foley was halfway to the total. After two months he had sured it.

In June 2016, Vegas beat competition from Quebec to be awarded an expansion team, with Foley paying a $500m (£397m) fee for the privilege.

At this point, Vegas was the largest US market not to have a major league team, yet the Arizona Coyotes, who had been struggling financially for years in Phoenix in the neighbouring state of Arizona, was hardly a ringing endorsement for having an NHL team in a city surrounded by sand.

Kerry Bubolz was named president of the Vegas Golden Knights in October 2016, a month before the team's own name was revealed.

"Launching an NHL expansion team in a desert environment, there was an element of 'well, that makes no sense, there's barely any ice there'," he tells BBC Sport.

That may have been so, but it became apparent that Vegas' population included more fans from ice hockey's heartlands markets than expected. While they would back their hometown team when they were in town, they followed the Golden Knights the rest of the season.

There were also plenty of residents who just wanted to get behind a Vegas team - no matter the sport.

"Our main priority was how we'd get out and engage the community in a very direct, very authentic way," says Bubolz. "We've always said that community is a sport, just like hockey."

Such was their impact that the Golden Knights had to cap their season-ticket at 14,000, in an arena which has 17,367 seats.

Foley's prediction that the team would reach the play-offs in three years and win the Stanley Cup in six fuelled the hype.

But as anticipation grew before their first game in October 2017, tragedy struck.

On 1 October, 22,000 country music fans were enjoying the final day of the Route 91 Harvest festival when a lone gunman opened fire on the crowd from the Mandalay Bay hotel, on the other side of the Strip.

It was the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in American history, with 58 people killed on the night and more than 800 injured, although further deaths have since been attributed to the shooting.

"It was terrible, demoralising," said Bubolz. "First thing we did was make sure our players and front office staff were safe, then the players - none of them were from here - were like 'what can we do? How can we help">