No doubt you’ve heard about the Yahoo! Sports server outage earlier this month that left thousands of fantasy owners unable to make lineup changes shortly before kickoff of Week 10’s Sunday games. Outrage ensued. Fantasy enthusiasts seethed. In a country obsessed with fantasy football, Yahoo’s technical glitch qualified as national news. Google it if you don’t believe me. (Or, if you’re not among the aggrieved, try a Yahoo! search.)

Yahoo’s engineers quickly fixed the problem, but not in time for fantasy owners to make desired lineup changes. The company then made an earnest attempt at damage control. But you know how fantasy owners are: We’ll scream for an official’s blood if his bad spot costs our running back a precious yard.

With so many people still fuming over Yahoo’s Exxon Valdez moment, this may seem like an odd time to offer thanks to the engineers and other technical people who maintain fantasy football sites and constantly come up with snazzy new features to further enhance our little hobby. But let’s face it: We non-technical folks usually only think about the tech people when something goes awry. When everything is humming along as usual, we tend not to think about all the hard work going into it.