By ruling Monday that any state can allow sports betting, the nation's highest court set America on track for what may be a historic expansion of its legal gambling offerings.

A Supreme Court decision Monday that could lead many states to legalize sports betting may provide some pocket change for those governments but not enough to help head off looming budget crises in a few years, experts say.

The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down a federal law prohibiting sports betting outside of Nevada, opening up the practice to any other states that choose to allow it.

Odysseus, who voyaged across the wine-dark seas of the Mediterranean in Homer’s epic, may have had some astonishingly ancient forerunners. A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned—and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neanderthals, the extinct cousins of modern humans.

Modern humans may not have been the first travelers to cross the seas.

We've been up here for three days, trekking the 10,000-foot ridges of the Schell Creek Range of east-central Nevada. I take a heavy breath and continue along another granite-and-limestone slope flecked with bristlecone pines — gnarled, 2,000-year-old survivors found only in the American West's highest, harshest landscapes. The searing in my legs and lungs eases as the severe incline levels out into a grassy meadow ringed by aspens, their leaves quaking in the cool breeze. Donnie Vincent holds up a hand to halt me, and grins.

First booze. Then pot. Now sports gambling.

The Supreme Court has struck down a federal law that bars gambling on football, basketball, baseball and other sports in most states, giving states the go-ahead to legalize betting on sports.

Because states have now been given the freedom to design their own sports gambling framework, uncertainty reigns over just how much effect the ruling could have on commercial real estate.