With NHL hockey largely off its menu, TSN is surely glad to see NCAA basketball soaring in popularity with a headline-generating March Madness run.

This year’s tournament final pulled big numbers for the network, which for the first time ran almost all the games in the series across its five feeds, tripling its coverage.

That increase in games made for a 24% jump in total audience numbers over last year’s tournament.

The main net alone saw a huge jump in viewership for Monday night’s final, with ratings increasing 62% over last year to an average audience of 325,000 for the Duke-Wisconsin game.

In all, 6.9 million unique Canadian viewers watched the tournament at least in part. Last weekend’s Final Four on Saturday was watched by a record 267,000 average viewers on TSN’s channels.

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