I don’t remember when I started listening to the TrueHoop podcast. I recall that it wasn’t so long before the time WaPo’s Tim Bontemps fell asleep on-air while dreams of sugarplums clickityclacked in his head.

What I do remember is how voracious consumption of the pod — at REGULAR SPEED, mind you — quickly became a matter of routine for me, a half-assed (two-thirds-assed?) New York sportswriter who works from home all by his lonesome and needs to hear voices chattering about either sports or that tits and dragons show all day long in order to stay focused, and sane besides.

I cover soccer for SB Nation and it’s plenty of fun, but I’m truly an Incurable, Hopeless Basketball Guy. I really had thought for months about writing a long-form profile of the uncommon cultural value I found in the interstitial spaces of the TrueHoop pod between the hoops news and analysis, particularly its engagements with race in America. I began putting together notes.

And then ESPN had its Red Wedding, and suddenly everything sucked ass.

It was in April that the Worldwide Leader up and gave the boot to Henry Abbott, the Pope of TrueHoop, along with cohorts David Thorpe, Justin Verrier, Marc Stein, Prim Siripipat, and Ethan Strauss. I assumed that the whole thing was over.

I mean, there’s no TrueHoop pod without fucking TrueHoop.

And there’s no TrueHoop without fucking Henry.

But while the corporate culling signaled a kind of death knell for this curious little brand, the podcast that bore its name would live on, mostly because of Jade Hoye.

Jade is a video producer. That’s what the internet says, anyway. But his with-tongue embrace of what the TrueHoop pod stood for eventually led, after a very brief hiatus, to TBA — The Basketball Analogy — a new brand that kept most of the old TrueHoop pod intact, including the hip hop and hair care-heavy Black Opinions Matter Mondays, the extremely white but equally entertaining Tuesday show, Kevin Arnovitz’s intimate interview episodes so often awash in foodie porn, and the occasionally two-hours-long Friday mailbag pods. While the team that made the shit pop was large, it all came back to Jade.

I needed this damn thing to get through the day. ANY day. Is that pathetic? Whatever. Shut up. I like listening to folks chatting about basketball.

And do-rags.

And then there was the time they brought on Freddie Prinze, Jr., and spent two and a half hours dissecting Rogue One right down to the most nerdgasmic details.

The pod’s freewheeling meditations on race, both on Black Opinions Matter Mondays and the Asian-American-centric weekend episodes known as “Fresh Off the Bench,” always got me the most. After all, race is everything, all the time, period. But generally, TrueHoop and TBA constituted an impressively nuanced morass of cultural criticism and sociological insights that resonated no matter where the topic turned or who was on the panel that day.

Again, that’s all Jade. He’s the Podfather.

From the intimidatingly brilliant Kaileigh Brandt’s extended riffs on the hard sciences to Marianno Bivins’ little known (and totally made-up) Monta Ellis facts to Tim MacMahon’s glorious frenemy relationships with Bontemps and Strauss and actually kinda everybody else, the pod was always much more than basketball. And yet, it was also a reliable place that you could turn to for impressively deep dives into NBA salary cap exceptions, utterly sane breakdowns of coaching carousels or the summertime free agency circus, and debates over the flaws within Defensive Real Plus-Minus, which I assure you is a thing that exists.

Jade Hoye was the sun at the center of the TrueHoop/TBA solar system, and he has officially left ESPN. Last Friday was his final day. His time producing podcasts can’t possibly be over — on the most basic level, there’s a legion of possibly-fucking-insane devotees who will never let that happen, including his own mother, Valerie, a respected television critic and frequent pod guest.

But for now, unless he wants me to totally slip into his DMs RIGHT THIS MINUTE(@RealFakeSamDunn, holler at me) and recruit him to help execute my plan for a New York City-based pod network called “Any Given Subway,” fans like us will have to figure out how to get through the work day without TBA or its eventual spiritual successor for a while. No matter how long that ends up being, it’s gonna feel like shit. What the hell am I supposed to do in the meantime? Listen to those freakin’ fratboys on Pardon My Take?

The fact is that I don’t know what to do at the moment. But I may manage a smile over the fact that the pod died once only to rise up again, just like Shaun Livingston.

And while James Bond and Freddie Gibbs might insist that you can only live twice, Jade Hoye sure did sound like he has a lot of life left in him on Friday’s goodbye pod.

After all, he can’t die yet. He just can’t — not until he watches Paid in Full.