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We all know this couldn’t have happened without the marches, the sit-ins, Martin Luther King’s courageous leadership and President Lyndon Johnson’s determination on civil rights legislation. Those were torrents that cut channels into the hard crust of discrimination.

But all of that was a long time ago, and it wasn’t enough to produce a president. Just as you can’t legislate morality, you can’t impose acceptance from above. It took another 40 years of steady drips and trickles, eroding away prejudice a bit at a time all around the clock. Barack Obama couldn’t have been elected president of the United States until it somehow made sense to millions of average Americans who grew up with casual racism.

What changed their views? Just as important as those shocking and impressive moments that stick in our national memory were the small, routine experiences that gradually introduced black Americans to white Americans like two strangers at a party.

You know how we met? Through sports and entertainment, mostly. Sorry to be so unsophisticated, but without games and shows, most of us out here in the hinterlands would think of black Americans only as the people we glimpse while driving through big cities.

If Henry Aaron and Bill Russell and Walter Payton hadn’t won over countless fans, one dignified game at a time, Barack Obama couldn’t have won over millions of voters.

If Bill Cosby and Denzel Washington hadn’t been so darned charming and likable, people wouldn’t have been comfortable voting for this Obama guy. Cosby told his stories, and it gradually dawned on white audiences: You mean black people have the same concerns we do?

I have no idea how Oprah Winfrey became the most beloved person on daytime television, but I know it has been a monumental step forward. I remember when she came to Madison County to do her show and I overheard a woman who looked and sounded like an ordinary Iowa voter. “I just love the … out of her,” the white woman said of the black one.

She didn’t just enjoy her; she loved her.

That’s even bigger than cheering for a guy who helps your team win.

Of course, this is all from the perspective of a small-town Iowa kid who didn’t know any black people growing up. It looks a lot different to New Yorkers and Chicagoans. But an awful lot of us Americans got to know minorities, for better or worse, through the media.

You admire somebody’s acting or envy his reverse slam dunks and, if you’re not careful, you forget why you were against minorities in the first place.

These are superficial connections; they’re not the same as really knowing one another. Still, they matter. The Obama story had to wait until white people were ready to switch away from ESPN and listen to what a serious black man had to say. It wouldn’t have gone anywhere without that fast start in the caucuses of very white Iowa.

No, we do not live in a post-racial era, not yet, not by a long shot. We live in an age where TV advertisers carefully apply a formula of one black man per group of buddies. That doesn’t quite match what we see in real life, where we still do a lot of self-segregating.

But we have recast the nation’s biggest show, and I’ll bet it’s like delivering your first line onstage. I’ll bet we quickly forget what a big deal it was and move on.

Ironically, the first black president’s biggest problem will be that so many Americans have such high expectations. Then again, a few million citizens are expecting only the worst.

Probably the best we can hope for is that four years from now he’ll be the subject of praise and criticism in nearly equal parts. Just like so many of the white men who held the job before him.