"I always thought I've been pretty good with people," Simpson told the board by video link, "and have basically spent a conflict-free life."
Simpson's eldest daughter, Arnelle Simpson, and one of Simpson's victims from the Vegas case testified in support of his release.
"I've known O.J. for a long time," said Bruce Fromong, a memorabilia dealer. "I don't feel that he's a threat to anyone out there. He's a good man. Nine-and-a-half to 33 years is way too long. I feel that it's time to give him a second chance."
The networks and cable-news stations carried the latest chapter live for more than an hour, programming their day with key players from Simpson's trial for murder in 1994 and 1995.
"The circus is back in town," declared Mark Fuhrman, the former Los Angeles detective whose racist remarks were weaponised by Simpson's defence, in an essay for FoxNews.com Tuesday. "O.J. Simpson is getting exactly what he loves - attention."
On Thursday morning's Today show, Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden revealed what he would ask Simpson if he was on the parole board.
"'Did you kill Ron and Nicole?'" Darden said, referring to Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, for whose murders Simpson was acquitted in 1995.
"But of course that's not legally relevant" to the Vegas case, said NBC host Savannah Guthrie.
"That's the one question I'd like to ask," Darden said. "I think that's the one question everybody would like to ask."
It probably is. O.J. Simpson is perhaps the only story that could force cable news to cut away from merry-go-round coverage of President Trump, Russia and the health care meltdown in Congress.
Sex, violence, wealth, power, hubris, race, fame, Kardashians, law and order - the Simpson case had it all.
"It is one whale of a good story," ABC's Ted Koppel said at the time.
The murder trial, broadcast by courtroom cameras and covered gavel-to-gavel by CNN, would come to represent a coarsening of public debate and an acceleration of the 24-hour news cycle.
"When a tabloid tornado begins to spin, even the best among us tend to get caught up in it," CBS anchor Dan Rather told the Los Angeles Times after the verdict, which polarised blacks and whites anew after the 1992 LA riots. "Before you know it, your standards have just broken open and you're not applying the same rules that you do to other stories."
People born between Simpson's arrest and acquittal are old enough to drink legally, and the 90s are now far enough gone to trigger waves of nostalgia. American culture was due for a reminder and a reckoning, and television provided two major rehashings of the saga just last year: a 10-episode FX miniseries starring Cuba Gooding jnr, and a 7½-hour, Oscar-winning documentary in which erstwhile confidantes professed their belief in Simpson's guilt, defence attorneys admitted to hoodwinking the jury, and one juror stated that the verdict was payback for the police beating of Rodney King.
Simpson, meanwhile, was where many people thought he should've been in the first place: prison. Public perception of Simpson's guilt has increased over time. Most people, black and white, now agree he was at least "probably guilty" for the murders, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll last year.
Simpson participated in Thursday's hearing by video conference from the medium-security Lovelock Correctional Centre, a crop of white buildings in the vast beigeness of northwestern Nevada. He's lived there as inmate 1027820 since he was convicted and sentenced in 2008, after he and five men, some armed with handguns, confronted and detained dealers of sports memorabilia in the Palace Station hotel in Vegas.
The families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman drew a direct connection between their 1994 murders and the Vegas confrontation.
"Allowing wealth, power and control to consume himself, he made a horrific choice on June 12, 1994, which has spiralled into where he is today," Brown Simpson's sister Denise Brown said after the conviction, which came 13 years to the day Simpson was acquitted for the murders.
The Goldmans had already won a $33.5-million wrongful-death lawsuit against Simpson, which they believed drove him to attempt to reclaim valuable memorabilia.
During the past nine years in Lovelock, Simpson mopped floors, disinfected gym equipment, coached inmate sports teams and led Bible study. In a sad echo of athletic competitiveness, he told the warden that he would try to be "the best prisoner they've ever had".
He missed his children's college graduations. He missed his sister's funeral. He was waitlisted for a prison course called "Commitment to Change". Younger inmates came to him for advice, Simpson claimed, and he has defused conflicts.
"I am sorry that things turned out the way they did," Simpson said during the hearing, as the parole board weighed Simpson's risk to the public. "I had no intent to commit a crime. I've done my time. I'd just like to get back to my family and friends - and believe it or not I do have some real friends."
"I thought his statements were self-justifying, self-pitying, showing no remorse, no understanding, no sense of reality about his own life," said CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin during the station's breathless coverage. Simpson "is a deeply delusional and self-obsessed narcissist, and good luck to America once he's out".
Simpson was paroled on one set of charges in 2013, after apologising to the board for the Vegas confrontation; the other charges required an additional four-year term, at minimum, which ends this year.
Simpson, who would move to Florida, could be golfing by autumn.
Darden published a best-selling memoir last summer called In Contempt. Defence attorneys Johnnie Cochran and Robert Kardashian are dead. F. Lee Bailey, who famously cross-examined Fuhrman, is disbarred, mostly broke, and living upstairs from a hair salon in Maine.
In September the maligned lead prosecutor Marcia Clark was at the Emmy Awards in support of The People vs. O.J. Simpson; her eyes welled when the actor Sarah Paulson took the stage and apologised to her on behalf of a judgmental nation.
And at the root of it all, still, is a double murder. On Good Morning America Thursday, the family of Ron Goldman vowed to continue going after Simpson's assets, as a form of perpetual punishment.
"What's troubling to me is [that] the whole system gives second chances to violent felons," said Fred Goldman, Ron's father. "Ron doesn't get a second chance."
