When they turned out the lights and the party finally was over, the greatest tribute to ABC’s Monday Night Football turned out to be this: that there was a tribute at all.

On a night when the New England Patriots and New York Jets played a mostly meaningless game won by the Pats, 31-21, Giants Stadium still took on the trappings of a momentous occasion.

Arguably the two most powerful men in sports, NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and ESPN/ABC sports boss George Bodenheimer, were in the house.

TV sets across America, probably more than usual, tuned in to listen to Al Michaels and John Madden and watch nostalgic clips. Media writers spilled one last round of ink chronicling it all.

It was an event that proved its own point – that the 36 seasons of MNF played a key role in the evolution from sports shown on TV to TV shows about sports. Not to mention TV’s self-referential tendency.

The result was a peculiar circumstance in which Madden seemed more relevant than Tom Brady, and Howard Cosell more so than Joe Namath.

Al Michaels, left, and John Madden rehearse a piece for their Monday Night Football finale. Monday's game - in which the Patriots beat the Jets, 31-21, in East Rutherford, N.J. - was the last MNF broadcast by ABC.

As Madden put it before the game, “This is a weird thing.”

The weirdest part for the NFL and ABC was balancing the desire to honor the past with a potentially contradictory message: that relatively little will change in 2006.

The league’s spin is it simply swapped its prime-time packages between cable and broadcast TV, with ESPN moving from Sunday to Monday and NBC taking over on Sunday.

It’s a tougher sell for ESPN, which still wants you to consider Monday the showcase and will deploy its array of “platforms” to make it happen – never mind NBC’s scheduling advantages.

John Skipper, ESPN’s senior VP for content, said last week, “The last time I checked, we’re still on the Roman calendar, and Monday night is Monday night, and Sunday night is Sunday night.”

We’ll see. For now, ABC had to walk a fine line acknowledging history without forgetting its corporate sibling is the future.

Bodenheimer said the transition is “a unique point in time” in TV history. “We’ve walked that balance between celebrating the past and celebrating the future, what we hope it to be,” he said.

Michaels will continue on ESPN, while Madden heads to NBC. The two will work a wild-card game and the Super Bowl together, but each felt the weight of the 555th and final MNF game on ABC.

“It’s a very emotional thing; this has been a big part of a lot of our lives,” Madden said.

Michaels said Monday night was not the time to look toward next year. “It’s more a matter of honoring; that’s the way I look at it 1,000 percent,” he said. “You don’t turn this into a promo. It’s too important.”

In fact, there was an ESPN 2006 promo during the second quarter, but mostly ABC managed to respect its legacy with an understated series of highlights and remembrances from Madden and Michaels.

The usually reclusive Don Meredith, a 1970 original, taped a piece for the intro from his home in New Mexico and was digitally made to appear to be beside Michaels and Frank Gifford.

Michaels paid tribute to the late Cosell in the first quarter. At halftime, Gifford appeared in the booth and ABC showed clips of an eclectic series of celebrity pre- and halftime guests. “My role was to keep law and order (between Meredith and Cosell),” said Gifford, who recalled the night Ronald Reagan was in the booth with his arm around John Lennon, explaining American football to him.

A visit to the production truck found producer Fred Gaudelli and director Drew Esocoff directing traffic on a dizzying array of screens to do the game justice but also slipping in the historical elements.

Meredith sang his trademark “The Party’s Over” before the fourth quarter. But the beauty of what Monday Night Football wrought for never-satiated sports fans is that the party never really ends.