Crucially, PBS member stations[0] run a lot of international—-often British—-shows, so it’s one of the few places you might possibly find cricket on American TV. Otherwise, your only bet might be one of the niche cable sports channels: not the main ESPN, but maybe ESPN2 or something.
[0] PBS is more like a network (the S is for ‘service’) that provides member stations with a common identity and a shared pool of programmming. They’re usually non-profits, and so would not be able to afford a national news bureau (etc) on their own.
As Geoduck put it, PBS stands for Public Broadcasting Service, which is a publicly-funded and viewer-supported network of highbrow and foreign content that's been around for my whole life, not sure if or how much longer than that. It's also the primary way that North Americans have consumed British culture for my whole life, until the internet brought widespread, umm, "availability".
So all through my Canadian youth I would flip through channels and periodically happen upon a Dr Who episode, or a British sport like Cricket, and wonder at the strangeness of my ancestral line (I'm extremely British, genetically speaking, and my family were both heavy socialists and also kind of cryptically proud of being part of the Empire. But they never admitted that, even to themselves I think...).
It's no surprise that it was hard to key into why Dr Who - for one example of a show I came to love as an adult - is so cool. I would read about it in Starlog, here and there, and the doctor sounded like a real badass on paper, but when I came across Tom Baker for the first time, he was no Han Solo, shall we say. Which is great, cause there are aspects of Star Wars that I kinda hate now (mostly the fans), but maybe not so much when you're 8 years old and have been watching laser blasts and ships exploding and whatnot. Even godawful tripe like Jason Of Star Command was more captivating at the time.
