Love it or loathe it, if you were born around the mid-to-late ’80s, chances are MTV’s “Total Request Live” played some sort of role in your musical up-bringing. Whether it be the catalyst for exposing you to albums that you couldn’t even sell to your local CD X-Change (Anybody want a copy of Kid Rock’s “Devil Without a Cause”?), a million forgotten boy bands (O-Town? Five? BBMak?) or the brief excitement of coming home and seeing your favorite band crack the Top 10. “TRL” was the American Bandstand to Generation Y.

Being a mirror of the music culture it represented, around the time its core audience took off for college, the boys bands disappeared (or went on to pursue solo projects, to varying degrees of success), Carson Daly split to host his talk show on NBC and MTV just let slowly decline before it could finally pull the cord.

But you can at least give MTV some credit for giving what was one of the biggest pop culture staples of the late 90s/early aughts a fond farewell. Bringing back Snoop Dogg, Kid Rock, Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, even the Backstreet Boys for the show’s swan song, “Total Finale Live.”

Even all the VJs were back including a much older, still greasy Jesse Camp!

But the whole thing harkened back to the day when you’d get home from school, forget the homework and just turn your brain off for mindless entertainment. Seeing the streets crowded with people as Backstreet Boys performed “I Want It That Way,” well for a 24-year-old living in Missouri, it brought me back to being 15 in Ohio when my sister and I would watch it – ah, the memories.

The whole thing was fitting from MTV still only playing 30 seconds or less of each video to the awkward satellite interviews, to the awkward in-house interviews with a clearly lit-up Kid Rock and Snoop Dogg. It was, just as “TRL” was, a time to turn off the brain and get lost in old memories of a time when Limp Bizkit was the coolest band on earth and the biggest debate was over whether the Backstreet Boys or *nsync was the better boy band.

Assuming the future is still stuck in a culture of nostalgia as this one clearly is, I imagine “TRL” will return in one form or another. Hopefully it will be one where the fascination with pretty rich girls with scripted problems will finally end and strangers having sex in hot tubs won’t be a big draw. Of course, that’s all wishful thinking. But for two and a half hours, Sunday night, probably one of the biggest pop culture phenomenons my generation will be known for (whether that’s good or not, it’s your choice) came to an end.