At the big leaving party, no one spoke to ESPN This may seem odd given the scale and global reach of the ESPN megalith, valued at an estimated £26 billion before tax, interest and Kevin Keegan's make-up bill. But wedged between the rock of Sky Sports and the hard place of parent company Walt Disney, which gave up on its loss-making progeny long ago, the British incarnation of ESPN somehow managed to cast itself in the role of the ballsy insurgent. That it ultimately failed to topple Sky does not make it a failure per se, when you consider what happened to its predecessors. Setanta went into administration with nine-figure debts. ITV Digital went bust and almost took the entire Football League with it. So a quiet, dignified exit, with BT Sport taking on ESPN's remaining contracts and its TV channel, might actually be a small success. Into the gap strides BT, all broad shoulders and fibre-optic sinew, with a muscular promotional campaign featuring Daniel Sturridge and Thomas Vermaelen in giant hamster wheels while Manu Tuilagi and Owen Farrell snarl at each other. Yeah, take that, Rupert Murdoch. But as ESPN takes one final gulp of airtime before handing over the keys and breathing its last, what will its legacy be? This is a tough question to answer, such is the relentless pace at which sports broadcasting moves (even Richard Keys and Andy Gray, only recently departed, now seem like relics of a bygone age, like pointy bras or car-starting handles). It went out of its way to promote foreign leagues and women's football. It pioneered the non-studio studio; the pitchside desk behind which its pundits could stand and get coins thrown at them. It devoted thousands of man hours to the restoration of the FA Cup's lustre; in fact, if you tune in now, Craig Burley and Paul Jewell are still analysing Wigan Athletic's last-gasp win over Manchester City at a now-deserted Wembley Stadium. Yet impressive as all this was, as a bequest to the British viewing public, it is still relatively piecemeal. Which means that most people's most abiding memory of ESPN will not be its coverage of the Premier League or the Bundesliga or the NBA. It will, instead, be ESPN Classic, a glorious, sequestered gem of a channel whose primary function was to ensure that whatever time you switched your television on, there would always be something to watch. What ESPN Classic appeared to understand was that at a viewing level, sport is essentially about the accumulation of good feelings. One of its early promotions advertised it as "the channel where England always win the Ashes." It was the grand corpus of sporting history purged of all evil, all sadness, all inanity. It was a microcosm of the world as most people wished it was; inspiring, life-affirming, filled with beauty and bathed in golden sunlight. And yesterday at 5am, it was literally the only place to watch Newcastle 5 Manchester United 0 from 1996 with a warm kebab in your hands. Now it, too, is gone, the home of nostalgia itself consigned to the memory bank. There is a certain irony in that.