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Mark your calendars: 2026 could be a big year in Miami sports

Shaquille O'Neal, Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat the championship trophy after winning the NBA Finals in 2006.
South Florida Sun-Sentinel /Mike Stocker
Shaquille O’Neal, Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat the championship trophy after winning the NBA Finals in 2006.
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Close your eyes and picture this: We’re celebrating a local team’s championship with a parade through downtown Miami … on flying cars.

It’s the year 2026, or thereabouts.

OK, open your eyes and we’ll explain.

The gambling website SportsBettingDime.com has set odds for when each city will win its next title in the big four professional sports. Their over/under line is 2026.5 for the next championship by either the Dolphins, Heat, Marlins or Panthers. (In other words, will it happen before or after the end of 2026?)

It raises some questions: Will our next championship parade cause a traffic jam of Jetsons-like flying cars?

If it comes more than a dozen years after the Miami Heat’s last title, might the sons of LeBron James or Dwyane Wade be involved?

And by the time this happens, will sports betting actually be legal in Florida?

Only Cleveland (2027.5), Indianapolis (2028.5) and Detroit (2030.5) had longer odds of the 24 cities that SportsBettingDime.com listed.

The website also placed odds on each city’s chances of winning a title in this current cycle (2019-20 NBA, 2019-20 NHL, 2020 MLB, & Super Bowls 54 & 55). You can get 13/1 on a Miami title and a whopping 335/1 if you think two of our teams will win it all in that span. (With 13/1 odds, if you bet a hypothetical $1, you would win $13.)

Odds are also available on which team will be the next from our market to win a championship. The Heat and Panthers have the best odds (8/5), with the Marlins at 7/1 and the Dolphins at 8/1.

Believe it or not, we’re in better shape than when SportsBettingDime.com released similar odds at the start of 2019. Back then, they set the over/under for South Florida’s next title at 2028 and offered 60/1 that a Miami team would win it all in 2019.

Hopefully you didn’t waste your money on that bet. It would have been better spent investing in flying cars.