The wind changed sometime during Friday night. That old canopy pegged down for far too long gave up the ghost and flew away. Whoosh, to the end of an era. Vroom, as Gaybo hit the dust on his new Harley Davidson. Send us a postcard, pal, wherever you are. Tell us you wish we were there.
Wherever he is today, we're certainly somewhere else. Not just because of being Late-Lated out, or having deconstructed the whole 37 years of his show to death. The canopy blew off, you see, the one that still gave shelter to some of the old days and the old ways, along with all the new ones. All those bridgeheads between secular and sacred, rich and poor, culchies and jackeens, Great or Civil War veterans and the rows that followed. We could go on.
The folk who teared up when he stood with his family - the modest, unsung, Kathleen Watkins reaching behind to include his assistant Maura Connolly in the frame - did so not only because the beer and the wine were flowing, or because some of the old jokes were so bad. It was as if someone had held a camcorder to the progress of the nation, as it used to be called, and then replayed it as a video where there was a memory for everyone in the audience but only some you were allowed to take home.
If each of those memories was a white dove, then we might barely glimpse the last of them this morning, heading off somewhere west of Dun Aengus.
Public memories, sure, but private ones too. In the forest that was Ireland, you could hear the sound of tall trees that came crashing down, of taboos shattered and thrown into the bin. You could see how the mighty had fallen, and wonder at how many of them had managed to stay in power so long.
You could fast forward from the Space Race or the young Taca heads to all the controversies around people and the lies we now knew they told. Those were the days when you tell a lot about a person by the party piece they sang - and everyone had to sing a party piece if you weren't to think they were above themselves. Even Peter Brooke.
SOME VIPs he had helped to make went on to honour him as their rainmaker, and as a man whose power grew to rival theirs. His bosses, his colleagues, the people to whom he gave a break. Byrne and his show were the first and greatest examples of media power.
He made F.X Martin such a celebrity that Wood Quay became a cause celebre. Sister Stan too and her championing of the homeless, although she did not appear that night. Bertie came, as Bertie would. It being television, we noted he had put on a noticeable bit of weight.
But mixed up in that more social spread were the people you had watched the show with, when you watched it, and the person you were then. Hopes and dreams - for me, my two departed grannies who had never missed Gay Byrne, the delight of being allowed stay up late, and that scorching mortification if "rude" things were discussed on television while your parents were in the same room. Then what things you got up to when you went out instead.
You could track the last days of the parlour song, where a community sang from the same song sheet and then pretended to, the last days when amateurs could share the same platform as international megastars, the way that broadcasting massively expanded its professional and technical skills. But also, chart that increasingly flabby sense of being comforted by the prospect of a virtual community we had in reality left far behind.
It was not only a "meeja" thing. The citizens who really miss Gay Byrne far outnumber those suits who worry about all the millions in advertising revenue he generated for the national broadcaster, or the ones who knew he was always good for a story which was sure to boost circulation and sales.
Perhaps you teared up at some point that night. Or maybe you hated it all along. He was not, let's face it, an Irish Times man. Or not when he started. He had the common touch, which may be why so many people thought him vulgar, rather than in tune. No one proper believed in popular culture back then, bar some sweet-talking disc jockeys (how quaint the phrase seems now) and the odd social theorist who said Elvis was the Second Coming.
Of course there are parallels between his rise and rise and the way that media became the new Church. Then, a broadsheet had to educate; now, it claims to entertain too.
MEDIA literacy was only one of the skills we learned. Byrne and his team gave us permission to enter a world of great sex, safe sex, fast cars and loadsamoney. Truth to tell, we gave it to ourselves, but as a speaker said on Friday night, it was handy to have someone else to blame.
You could watch a superstar such as Liam Neeson and get the sense that he was really a wean from Ballymena, or see Harry Crosbie the multimillionaire as a more than averagely streetwise brand of Jack the Lad. After that, you made up your mind about the tales they were telling.
"We did all that, we lived through all that, we survived all that," said Gay. "The innocence of it all." But not always, and not for everyone. Now that we are dancing as fast as we can, the credo it offered us sounds like the noise of one hand clapping on a very different stage.
It is liberating to escape the hegemony of The Late, Late, Show. Sure, it could on those great nights work like poetry, embracing the whole of society like the sweet songs of "a necklace of wrens", to borrow Michael Hartnett's words, binding us all together even while we were straining to take off in a thousand different directions at once.
This great experiment, this exercise in trying to test how far we can go without losing touch with each other needs new credos, new tests of its own truths and a whole new way of digging up its dirt. We are left to decide what we wish to take from that past, and where we will take things next.
If this is the moment of severance when the front gates of the national memory bank start to swing closed, then Byrne is the hinge who decided to bolt it. We're walking the wire without a safety net: it's time to do it on our own.