The estimable Adele

It's possible that Adele won't be the runaway winner at the 2012 Grammy Awards, to be broadcast at 8 p.m. Sunday on CBS3 from the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

With the Grammys, after all, the inexplicable often occurs. Last year, Canadian indie band Arcade Fire upset heavily favored Eminem for best album, the same category in which Herbie Hancock's The River (The Joni Letters) caused a tizzy by beating out both Amy Winehouse and Kanye West in 2008.

But in 2012, it would stand to reason that nothing can stand in the way of Adele. The mononymous Londoner's album 21, which contains songs written when she was that age, earned her six nominations, including album, song, and record of the year. (Kanye West actually leads with seven nominations, though he was shut out in the major categories; Bruno Mars and Foo Fighters also have six nominations.)

Adele, 23, is likely to annihilate the competition because she has single-handedly saved the music industry.

OK, maybe that's an exaggeration. Maybe the music industry, after years of failing to coherently respond to the Internet file-sharing revolution, is beyond saving.

But one needn't hyperbolize to make plain the way in which 21 - which this week, more than a year after its release, is again the No. 1 album - dominated 2011.

As Adele sang on the album's first single, "Rolling in the Deep," "don't underestimate the things that I will do."

For the first time in seven years, U.S. album sales ticked up in 2011, rising by 1.3 percent. The universally acknowledged reason: The extraordinary sales of 21, which moved a staggering 5.8 million copies, the most since Usher's Confessions sold more than 7 million in 2004, according to Nielsen SoundScan. (And Adele's not done yet - her total has topped 6.3 million, including 2012 sales.)

The Grammy are not merely a popularity contest.

Golden gramophones typically go to artists with a combination of commercial clout and perceived artistic merit.

21 has both. It's a creature thought to be extinct in a singles-first iTunes age: A blockbuster album by a superstar artist on a major label (Columbia) that's both packed with hits - the muscular "Rolling in the Deep," the tearjerker "Someone Like You," and the vengeful "Set Fire to the Rain," currently atop Billboard's Hot 100 - and also stands up as a cohesive personal statement. A classic breakup album, in fact.