Hockey Night in Canada as we know it is over. What’s next for a Canadian institution?

It was deemed Canada’s favourite TV show in 1957. Three years later, more than a quarter of the country was watching. It was, as the Star proclaimed, “the only native attraction that could outdraw Hollywood’s biggest stars.”

But on Tuesday, Hockey Night in Canada as it has been known for the better part of the past century ended.

Since 2014, CBC had been sharing Saturday night NHL games with Sportsnet, which owned the rights. The two broadcasters announced Tuesday their partnership was no more.

CBC still owns the Hockey Night in Canada brand and plans to use it going forward, spokesperson Chuck Thompson told the Star. But that use will no longer include any NHL hockey on Saturday night as it has for more than seven decades.

Experts say it is a devastating — if not totally surprising — blow to a Canadian institution, one that has documented the national pastime for nearly half of the country’s history.

“(It) is something that Canadians have had for decades and decades, and have taken for granted. It’s just always kind of going to be there,” said Christopher Cwynar, an assistant professor at Trent University’s Durham campus who researches Canadian public media. “That’s not going to be there anymore.”

A long, storied history

Hockey Night in Canada traces its roots to radio in the 1930s and made the jump to television — both in English and French — in 1952. There were misgivings at first. NHL president Clarence Campbell worried TV would cannibalize ticket sales, so broadcasts began an hour after the opening faceoff. Only one English telecast from the first season survives today, according to the Canadian Communications Foundation.

Despite its hitches, Canadians were enraptured. By 1954, a reported 77 per cent of TV sets in Montreal were tuned to the games. Three years later, the Star reported there will “always be a list of clients anxious to sponsor them, and they’ll outrate every other Canadian show.”

Even today, the mythology lives on: the name, the theme, the idea of Canadians gathered around a TV or radio by the millions. It all still carries power.

“It’s arguably been the program that, for the longest time, has brought the most Canadians together in a consistent, shared media experience,” said Stacy Lorenz, a professor at the University of Alberta who researches media, hockey and national identity. “And that goes beyond sport. I can’t really think of anything else that would match that.”

Hockey Night in Canada was, to some, the great unifier.

Another evolution for the national institution

The program wavered over the years. In the 1970s, ratings dropped and sponsorships waned. But the real blow for CBC’s role, according to Cwynar, came with the rise of cable and, later, streaming.

NHL broadcast rights, which sold in the early 1960s for about $17 million a year in today’s money, became far more lucrative; just last year, Rogers committed to paying $11 billion for its current 12-year deal. Simultaneously, hockey’s grip on Canadian culture has loosened, Lorenz said. While NHL viewership remains high, youth participation has cratered.

Both factors made it increasingly difficult to justify spending so much keeping the program.

“The place of Hockey Night in Canada, and hockey, has been changing for several decades,” Lorenz said, “and this is another indication of that.”

And so free hockey every Saturday night is no more.

Sportsnet said it will continue delivering the “time-honoured tradition” of Saturday night hockey, but it won’t be under the same name. CBC said it will launch a new Saturday night show highlighting Canadian athletes, and Thompson, the spokesperson, said the broadcaster will announce what it plans to do with the Hockey Night in Canada brand in the coming weeks.

“We have every intention of using it going forward,” Thompson said.

Lorenz speculates CBC may use it to instead broadcast women’s hockey, or senior-level men’s hockey from across the country. Getting viewership for alternative programming is “going to be a bit of an uphill battle,” he said.

And is it really Hockey Night in Canada if it’s not the NHL on Saturday night? Lorenz isn’t sure.