Help, my podcast is blowing up!

I've been hosting a local hockey podcast with my best friend for the last 2 seasons and the last few episodes have blown up big time. Our IG has nearly tripled in a week, I started a YouTube channel for clips and I have 500 views in the first 24 hours and I even have a meeting with a city commissioner who is a huge fan of the hockey team to discuss how we can get better exposure to the community. We just switched to video and the local hockey rink picked us up to put us on their YouTube channel, too.

I live in a small town (50,000ish) and every hockey game is 1500 attendees or more. It's a crazy scene for a junior hockey team, all the other teams only have a few hundred watchers every game. I've been looking at rate sheets and thinking I'd like to start bringing in some local business sponsors, but everything I'm seeing is based on CPM (per thousand). I'm guessing my audience is probably max 20,000, so $20 per thousand doesn't seem like it'll get me very far.

Question is: is there a way to monetize this in such a small town? The fans are rabid and support like crazy anytime a new sponsor of the team buys in, so selling should be easy, just not at standard podcasting rates. Has anyone else run a local/sports podcast been successful at making it into a paying gig?