Sara Haines has been on ABC for some time, but now, she’s one of its most prominent faces.

Having returned as a co-host of the network’s Daytime Emmy-winning weekday talk show “The View,” she has become a game-show host as well, as the new Thursday entry “The Chase” premieres Jan. 7. In each episode, three contestants face off against top-winning “Jeopardy!’’ alumni James Holzhauer, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — and the typically sunny Haines laughs that she feels smarter simply by standing there.

“Games are nostalgic for me,” she says. “When my family has gotten together, we’ve always played games … everything from Taboo to Trivial Pursuit, you name it. There’s a unifying goodness to a game; there’s competition, but if you get lost in that, you’ll miss the beauty of the game. It truly is a journey, not a destination.”

Haines admits she marveled at her former daytime co-host Michael Strahan doing ABC’s “The $100,000 Pyramid”: “I was like, ‘I can’t believe people get paid to do that.’ When I got the opportunity to do ‘The Chase,’ the show got the last laugh on me. My two siblings called and said, ‘You hate trivia!’ And I said, ‘I know!’ To clarify ‘hate,’ I don’t like playing trivia, but I like witnessing it — so being a host is the perfect spot to watch these geniuses.”

In fact, the “genius” aspect lured Haines to join “The Chase.” She attests, “I love smart people, and I love learning. I always enjoyed school, and to be around people I use as my personal Google … when I was on the set, I’d scream up to them, ‘What does “eponymous” mean?’ I’d just ask them everything.”

A big plus for Haines was the caliber of “The Chase’s” contestants. “I didn’t know you could find people who were so smart and also so relatable, you wanted them to win,” she reflects. “It was just a good-on-good sandwich.”

With the inauguration of President-elect Joseph Biden imminent, political discussions remain prominent on “The View,” but Haines is glad that more of the fun of the show has returned in recent weeks. She notes that once the election results were confirmed officially, she felt “a relief I didn’t realize I was carrying. I could kind of breathe again. The temperature of this country has been sad and scary.

“People can disagree with me politically,” adds Haines, “but I think we all can agree that the rhetoric of the last four years wasn’t even partisan, it was out of the realm of what we’d ever seen before. I want to go back to the days of productive conversation. I just feel hopeful in general about seeing a better future.”