I couldn’t make it past lunchtime on Monday without visiting Grantland’s home page. Such has been my habit since the sports and pop culture site launched in June 2011—Grantland upon waking up, Grantland at lunch, Grantland while walking between classes.

But on Monday, I was greeted with a goodbye message, a simple five-syllable epitaph for a site that made its name with smart, incisive, longform journalism: “It was a good run.”

It was a magnificent run for Bill Simmons’ brainchild, which far surpassed the dour predictions heaped upon it at its creation. But the run ended on Friday, when parent company ESPN shut off Grantland’s operations and relegated the site to an archival journalistic graveyard.

At the beginning of those archives is an oral history Grantland published in its first week on The National Sports Daily, a “long-dead and short-lived newspaper that…attempted to cover sports in a way that no other American publication would, could, or had ever even imagined.” I knew almost nothing about this ambitious journalistic project before reading, but I soon learned about the publication that “launched careers and developed the voices and thoughts that would go on to frame the next generation of sports media.”

The symbolic resonance is almost too precise: Grantland heralded its eventual legacy almost before it had begun.

That framing extended behind the careers of Grantland’s own staffers; it reached into dorm rooms across the country as fledgling writers picked up the pen and sought a voice of their own. A year and change into Grantland’s existence, when I joined Student Life and launched my own journalistic career, the site transformed from entertainment to aspiration, from a source of fun to a guidebook.

To become a writer is to read, and read some more, and keep reading after that. To become a writer is to toil in search of one sentence, one turn of phrase, that can match the rhetorical power that runs through every Brian Phillips longform like a current, allowing his pieces to hum and crackle with a potent electricity.

To become a writer is to learn from a lightning storm how to first turn on a light bulb.

Above all else, a Grantland post succeeded because it fused informative insights with creative storytelling; reading it was just plain fun. The site was a paragon of stylistic diversity, where in the span of an hour I could enjoy a fun-spirited comparison of old hockey video games, an enlightening analysis of pick-and-roll defenses and a thoughtful assessment of football’s concussion crisis—and then switch to the Hollywood Prospectus tab and find the same from a pop culture perspective.

I tried to harness this brand of stylistic experimentation in the development of my own writing; many of my best stories were directly inspired by a Grantland piece’s style and smarts. It’s thanks to Grantland’s structural ingenuity that I framed my columnar reaction to a playoff loss via the five stages of grief, and Jonathan Abrams was my unwitting mentor as I organized Student Life’s oral history on the Ferguson protests last year.

I entered my relationship with Grantland as a reader and left it a writer—or a prospective writer, at least, still fiddling with a light bulb in the dark.

There are ample alternatives from which I can continue to learn, of course. The fear that Grantland’s dissolution is a death blow for smart sports storytelling is overblown and, ironically, evokes the sort of bombastic, hot-take analysis to which Grantland never succumbed.

ESPN proper employs a dozen talented writers for its baseball coverage alone, and the Internet at large is like an iceberg, with 90 percent of its best prose hidden on niche sites and upstart blogs that have yet to be discovered by a mass audience.

But Grantland was special, embodying both a concentration of creativity and an aggregation of my favorite writers, and I can only hope it will indeed frame the next generation of sports media. I eagerly await that generation—of which I dream to be a part—developing its voice and building up its bylines.

In the meantime, I have three Grantland tabs still open from the site’s final day: two stories unread, a podcast not yet listened to, three bold, burgundy “G” logos waiting untouched on my screen. I don’t know when I’m going to view them. I don’t want to shut the power off.