‘SportsCenter’ officially reaches the end of its golden age

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She hosted more than 5,000 editions of SportsCenter over 34 years, but when Linda Cohn walks out of ESPN this week, she takes the last remnant of the show’s golden era with her.

When Cohn arrived at ESPN in 1992, the sports anchor was in the middle of a transformation unlike anything the industry had seen before or has seen since. Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann were turning the 11 p.m. SportsCenter into something with no real precedent: a late-night highlight show with the cultural pull of appointment television, built on the simple but powerful reality that if you wanted to see what happened in sports that day, you had no other option. The highlights lived at ESPN and only at ESPN, and the anchors who delivered them became, in a way that seems almost impossible to explain now, genuinely famous.

Stuart Scott arrived in 1993 and introduced “Boo-yah” and “as cool as the other side of the pillow” to the American sports vernacular, phrases that became part of how a generation of sports fans actually talked. Rich Eisen brought polish. Kenny Mayne brought deadpan absurdism. Craig Kilborn brought barely concealed contempt for the format he was simultaneously elevating. The show was capacious enough to hold all of them, and the anchor desk was the most aspirational seat in sports media. Broadcasting students at schools like Syracuse stopped wanting to be the next Al Michaels. They wanted to anchor SportsCenter.

Cohn fit differently into that era than most of her contemporaries. While Eisen spent much of his prime tenure alongside Stuart Scott, Cohn worked with virtually everyone who ever passed through Bristol, which she noted as much herself on Eisen’s This Was SportsCenter podcast last week. In that sense, she was the show’s most complete embodiment. Not its most iconic voice, but its most constant one, present through every era and every iteration of what SportsCenter was trying to be.

There was a time when if you missed the game and missed SportsCenter, those moments simply ceased to exist for you. There was no second option, no alternate route, no way to retrieve them from anywhere else on the dial. That scarcity vaulted the show into the cultural stratosphere and transformed its anchors into something approaching genuine American celebrities, because they were the sole custodians of the images an entire country had no choice but to seek out to see.

No rival network ever came close to replicating what ESPN constructed over two decades. What dismantled it was the internet — specifically YouTube and social media — which did not so much compete with SportsCenter as dissolve the premise on which its cultural authority rested. The highlights no longer lived exclusively at ESPN. It lived everywhere, instantaneously, seconds after it happened, on every device and platform simultaneously, free and inexhaustible and entirely beyond anyone’s control.

SportsCenter did not disappear. It still airs, still draws a meaningful audience, still occupies a central place in ESPN’s programming. But the version of the show that made Linda Cohn famous — the version whose power derived from the exclusive custody of images the country had no other means of accessing — walked out that door a long time ago.