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Sad To See MIke & the Mad Dog End

It is true that things do not last forever. Nothing can be more shocking or painful when something that seems so good, ends abruptly.

For 19 years Mike Francessa and Christopher Mad Dog Russo co-hosted a five and a half hour radio show every weekday from 1:00 to 6:30 pm, and whether it was a rainy March Tuesday, or a week before the Super Bowl, or a nice sunny crisp day on a Friday in mid-October, the "Mike and the Mad Dog Show" gave me and many listeners enough news and entertainment to make the middle of day grand.

It will be hard to accept football Fridays without both Francessa and Russo making their NFL picks for week during the 5:00 hour.

It will be hard to accept that the two of them drilling a coach, or general manager, or player for making a stupid play or managerial move, that will now, only include one voice of reason.

It will be hard to accpet that "Mad Dog's" always right to the point analysis of various topics from Adam 'Pacman' Jones, to the phoniness of over-paid pro athletes in the Olympics, or steroids in baseball will no longer grace the airwaves of 660 AM.

It will be hard to go through the drudgering of the week between the NFC and AFC Championship games and the Super Bowl without Russo dressing like George Washington to help Francessa award Super Bowl tickets to fans who can succesfully answer NFL trivia questions, only to have both Russo and Francessa yell and scream at fans who can't answer an easy question like, "Who was the MVP of Super Bowl III?"

It will be hard not to hear Russo put Francessa through a segment on tennis, or his beloved San Francisco Giants, or even proclaiming the Francessa's Yankees dead every June 1, as the two of them always found a way to get a chuckle out of each other on those topics.

And, it will be strange to hear Francessa broadcast the annual summer finale at Bar-A in south Jersey by himself. The event became something of a staple, as both Francessa and Russo would end their summer vacation, a week early, to broadcast down there signifing the end of summer and the unoffical beginning of football season and fall.

Whether the topic was World Series, NBA Finals, Super Bowl, Jets, Giants, Yankees, Mets, Knicks, Isiah Thomas, Bill Parcells, Eli Manning, A-Rod, Mike Piazza, Armando Benitez, San Francisco Giants in Game Six of the 2002 World Series, the Red Sox run in 2004, or the Mets collapse in 2007, Francessa and Russo covered it all - and we will never forget all of the good times they gave listeners for 19 years.

The show will always be missed because things never, ever last forever - unfortunatly.

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