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

The Town is losing its final professional sports team as the Oakland A’s slink off to a temporary home in Sacramento, before arriving on the glittery gambling desert of Las Vegas. The A’s played their final game in Oakland’s Coliseum on 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 were made and superstar athletes were born.

A 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 two venues surrounded by parking lots and a BART station on 120 acres just off Interstate 880.

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

The A’s are set to play next season at a minor-league venue in West Sacramento while they try to turn their dreams of moving to Las Vegas into a reality.

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

That left just the A’s, whose billionaire owner John Fisher has made enemies of local government leaders and journalists and caused even die-hard fans to hope he just goes far away.

So, now, in the space of just five years, an integral part of American sports history has been wiped out.

This was the place where John Madden roamed the sidelines and Al Davis elevated the phrase “Just win, baby!” from a motto into a mission statement. It was the site of indelible moments like the Sea of Hands and the “Heidi” Game. It’s where Oakland native Rickey Henderson transformed the base paths into his own personal track meet and the “Swingin’ A’s” won World Series titles and where Curry changed basketball by draining shots from outer space. It was the cradle of baseball innovation, where Billy Beane and Moneyball changed the sport forever and the hotbed of talent that produced the likes of Bill Russell, Frank Robinson, Jason Kidd, Marshawn Lynch and countless others.

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

Perhaps Oakland, for all its problems (both the city’s District Attorney and Mayor face recall elections) will rebound.

With the A’s flirting with leaving Oakland last year, childhood friends Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel devised what at first sounded like a crazy plan: They should start a baseball team to replace them.

“The idea is nobody can tell us that we can’t have baseball here,” Carmel said. “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 in the independent Pioneer League, 14 months after Freedman and Carmel began working on the project. In some ways, their very existence is a form of protest. The Ballers adopted the same green and gold color scheme as the A’s. They call themselves the B’s.

— Santa Cruz Sentinel