One of the greatest sports towns in America became an athletic ghost town Thursday.

The Town is losing its final big league sports team as the Oakland A’s slink off to a temporary home in West Sacramento, before arriving on the glittery gambling desert of Las Vegas. The A’s played their final game in Oakland’s crumbling Coliseum Thursday.

And for the fans, sold down the freeway by owners of the Warriors, Raiders and A’s, well, the memories will be all that remain.

A generation ago, Oakland was a center of the American sports universe, a community of just over 400,000 people where champions reigned and superstar athletes were born.

A pro sports franchise from “The Town” — San Francisco is The City — won a title in five straight years in the 1970s: baseball’s Athletics in ‘72, ‘73 and ‘74, the NBA’s Warriors in ‘75 and the Raiders in ‘76.

All three teams played just steps apart at the two Oakland Coliseum venues surrounded by parking lots and a BART station just off Interstate 880.

The baseball A’s were the last team standing in the East Bay, a diverse region of nearly 2.8 million bigger than Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Cleveland, Indianapolis or Milwaukee — all of which have multiple pro sports franchises.

Their loss is the final, devastating blow for a city that has had its sports scene completely decimated. The NBA’s Warriors after 47 seasons in Oakland moved to a sparkling new arena across the bay in San Francisco. The Raiders followed them out the door a year later to move into a publicly subsidized football stadium in Vegas.

That left just the A’s, whose billionaire owner John Fisher has made enemies of local fans, civic leaders and journalists, who never believed he wanted to keep the team in Oakland. The A’s are set to play next season at a minor-league venue in West Sacramento while awaiting a hoped-for Las Vegas ballpark.

So, now, in the space of just five years, an integral part of American sports history has been wiped out. The Oakland sports complex was the place where John Madden roamed the sidelines and Al Davis elevated the phrase “Just win, baby!” into a mission statement and icons like Kenny “Snake” Stabler and raucous, but devoted, fans wearing the team colors of silver and black made the Oakland Raiders synonymous with outlaw football. (For the record, the Raiders left Oakland twice, the first time for Los Angeles in 1982, before returning in 1995 under terms highly unfavorable to the city, then finally leaving again in 2020.)

It’s where Oakland native Rickey Henderson transformed the base paths into his own personal track meet and the Swingin’ A’s won three World Series titles and the Bash Brothers another; and it’s where Curry changed basketball by draining shots from the far reaches of the basketball court.

It was the cradle of baseball innovation, where Billy Beane and Moneyball analytically changed the sport, and where local fields and basketball courts produced the likes of Bill Russell, Frank Robinson, Jason Kidd, Marshawn Lynch and other great athletes.

The Warriors, Raiders and A’s all have had slightly different motivations for bailing on Oakland, but ultimately they all came down to money other municipalities had to offer for stadiums and the money that Oakland lacks amid budget woes and an increase in homelessness and crime.

Perhaps Oakland, for all its problems, may rebound. There’s the Oakland Roots, the local minor league soccer team that has used crowdfunding rather than billionaires to raise money, and they’re not alone. When it became likely last year the A’s would leave, Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel started a minor-league baseball team to replace them.

“The idea is nobody can tell us that we can’t have baseball here,” Carmel told reporters. “It felt like the world was trying to tell Oakland, ‘You are not a pro sports city.’”

Enter the Oakland Ballers, who just finished their first season. The Ballers adopted the same green and gold color scheme as the A’s and they call themselves the B’s.

As the Santa Cruz Warriors have shown, it’s the town(s) and the fans that must matter — and where new loyalties will spring up. And for Oakland, we trust “Just win, baby,” will again be heard.