Track and field is always yearning for ways to “grow the sport” with small tweaks here and there to make competition more exciting for fans.

The men’s two mile field at the Millrose Games provided a template of how to do just that.

Meet organizers brought together some of America’s best from distances both shorter and longer than the two mile — U.S. 1500 meter Olympians Matt Centrowitz and Ben Blankenship, 5,000 meter specialists Ben True and Ryan Hill, and top steeplechasers Donn Cabral and Andy Bayer.

What you got was a fascinating field of names that don’t typically face off against one another.

So why can’t this be replicated on a bigger stage, say at an off-year U.S. outdoor champs?

With no world or Olympic team to qualify for, there’s no reason USATF has to put on standard race distances.

Here’s my proposal for the 2018 U.S. outdoor champs: scrap the 1500, 3,000 meter steeplechase and 5,000 meter distances and replace it with a single 3000 meter race.

Pool the prize money that would have been awarded in the three events into the 3,000 meter prize purse. This will make it more financially lucrative for athletes to compete rather than skip the meet and prepare for big European invitationals, as Centrowitz did in 2014.

There’s precedent for this from the 2015 U.S. indoor championships, when rather of contesting the standard 400 and 800 meter races, organizers spiced things up with races of 300, 600, and 1000 meters. We got some pretty intriguing match-ups, particularly in the 1000 meters with 800 meter specialists like Mike Rutt and Harun Abda facing off against milers Robby Andrews and Kyle Merber.

Just think of the potential for an women’s 3k final: Simpson vs. Rowbury vs. Martinez vs. Huddle vs. Houlihan vs. Infeld vs. Conley vs. D’Agostino vs. Coburn vs. Quigley.

Or on the men’s side: Centro vs. Jager vs. Chelimo vs. Hill vs. True vs. Jenkins vs. Mead vs….. I’m going to stop there to keep you from drooling all over your keyboard.

You get the idea — the bigger names we can get to face off against one another, the more hype for the race. And the more hype, the more eyeballs on the TV.

And that has to be good for “growing the sport.”