It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

And not just because a guy in a red suit is traipsing the globe with a sack of free loot.

Rather, because the final week of the calendar’s final month invariably brings with it a cadre of columns proclaiming the best, worst and/or most memorable items of the year that was.

It’s no different in the boxing space here at CBSSports.com, where we’ll do our late December journalistic duty and put in our two cents on the seven most important superlatives of 2014.

On with the show…

Network of the Year: HBO
The “Network of Champions” has been the sport’s gold standard for a generation, but it got real competition from Showtime last year after the long-time cable upstart landed Floyd Mayweather Jr. for a six-fight deal that’ll presumably include his final ring appearances before retirement.

The long-time order was restored in 2014 by a series of positives for HBO, though, which included two pay-per-views headlined by a resurgent Manny Pacquiao, the emergence of light heavyweight title claimant Sergey Kovalev and the continuing rise of middleweight belt-holder Gennady Golovkin.

Prospect of the Year: Felix Verdejo
Some outlets had Verdejo -- a 21-year-old from Puerto Rico -- on their prospect radar as early as 2013, but the ex-Olympian definitively stepped into blue-chip status this year thanks to a seven-fight run that included six wins by stoppage across a total of 21 rounds.

He enters 2015 with 16 wins and 12 KOs in a now 24-month pro career, and the only question remaining now is just how fast Top Rank plans to get him into the contender/championship environment and whether it’ll occur in the 130- or 135-pound ranks.

Robbery of the Year: Timothy Bradley D12 Diego Chaves
The Bradley-Chaves debacle limped in under the year-end wire on Dec. 13, when the former two-division champion appeared ready to restart his career with a grinding, but decisive defeat of the rugged Argentine. CBSSports.com, in fact, had it eight rounds to four for Bradley when it was over.

But the judges went another way. Burt Clements scored it a more narrow 7-5 verdict for Bradley, but he was outvoted by the all-square scoring of Craig Metcalfe and an abominable 8-4 view for Chaves by the typically reliable Julie Lederman, providing a three-way split draw.

Upset of the Year: Chris Algieri SD 12 Ruslan Provodnikov
Few people outside of Huntington, N.Y. could have identified Algieri in a police lineup prior to mid-June, but the mettle he showed in climbing off the deck twice in the first round against Provodnikov paved the way for his rocket ride to stardom by the holiday season.

The 30-year-old flummoxed the “Siberian Rocky” for the remainder of their 12-round scrap and earned the World Boxing Organization (WBO) 140-pound title at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, then parlayed the win into a PPV match with Pacquiao five months later in China.

Knockout of the Year: Carl Froch TKO 8 George Groves
The British rivals authored one of 2013’s biggest controversies in their first match, when Froch was the beneficiary of a controversial stoppage by referee Howard Foster in the ninth round of a fight in which he trailed on all three scorecards.

There was no such doubt in the rematch, when, before a packed house at Wembley Stadium, Froch landed a laser-guided missile of a right hand that decked Groves in the eighth round and prompted a wave-off from referee Charlie Fitch as the beaten man writhed on the floor.

Fight of the Year: Orlando Salido TKO 11 Terdsak Kokietgym
If Salido hadn’t already staked his claim as the world’s best -- and most entertaining -- 12-loss fighter, he did so with a thrilling stoppage of Kokietgym, who validated his own “Pit Bull” nickname by dropping Salido three times and rising off the floor three times himself.

Both men were down in the first, before Salido hit the floor in the second and fifth rounds and Kokietgym did so in the fourth and seventh. The fight’s seventh knockdown was finally its last, prompting Eddie Claudio to halt matters after 16 seconds of the 11th round.

Fighter of the Year: Terence Crawford
There was hardly a shortage of fighters who had big years in 2014, and names like Kovalev, Golovkin, and Wladimir Klitschko -- not to mention Pacquiao and Mayweather -- probably deserve at least some consideration for 2014’s top individual superlative.

But no fighter finds himself in a more radically different place at year’s end than Crawford, who won his first world title in March, defended it in one of the year’s best fights in June and impressively established himself as a future big-fight commodity in November.

An imminent move from 135 to 140 pounds places the Omaha, Neb. native among the sport’s big names, and he certainly seems poised for multiple career bites at the FOTY apple.