And so he exits as he arrived: Defiant, cocksure, more than a little mad, and worshipped.

Calling Diego Armando Maradona a soccer god is not idle exaggeration. There is after all a Church of Maradona with a reported membership of 100,000 people. Now, however, Maradona is no longer the manager of Argentina’s national soccer team. Last Tuesday, in Buenos Aires, the Argentine Football Association voted unanimously not to renew his contract.

Who coined the line “Summertime and the livin’ is easy”? Get outta town, whoever you are.

This is no easy summer in the TV racket and on this beat. Day and night, I’m inundated with news, asked to write about this or that, get up at an unholy hour of the morning and pontificate about events on some early-morning TV or radio show.

It’s all about change, isn’t it? Meanwhile, everybody is moseying along thinking that some things never change. You go home, turn on the TV and, failing to find anything new, you turn to CNN. Might be some news story you need to know about. And there is Larry King, having dragged his bag of bones into the studio again and been propped up to interview someone he has interviewed about 24 times over the years. If it’s a woman, he might even have been married to her at one point. Things change – soon enough, you will be denied this experience.

What does it all mean? Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Let’s trawl through the changes looking for clues.

During the World Cup (I’ll stop mentioning it soon), the English team caused much mirth when some players complained about their daily routine. Isolated at a luxury hotel/resort, like most teams, some guys whined that after breakfast and training and lunch, they were obliged to rest for the remainder of the day. Watch television, play video games, watch World Cup games on TV. “Very boring,” one fella said.

As one pundit in the English press acidly remarked, the chaps were finding their days rather tedious because they weren’t able to engage in their usual, daily post-training routine of “drinking, gambling and whoring.”

We expect male pro athletes to be boorish and a bit thick, easily distracted, with the attention span of a three-year-old and the adolescent appetites of a 15-year-old. They’re not paid to be models of propriety.

In the big-shot acting racket, we expect a goodly number of movie stars to be impossible jerks, attention-seeking weirdos and egomaniac cranks who believe that their opinions about various things matter greatly. Mel Gibson is only the most high-profile serial offender in this category.

In the past few days, as people prattled on about the retirement of Lloyd Robertson, the arrival of Lisa LaFlamme as CTV’s news anchor and a looming news-anchor announcement by Global, I was often told that nobody is watching TV these days. This opinion was usually delivered with some delight.

The main reason for certain parties to assert that TV is dead is pretty clear. During the first week of July, the U.S. networks had the fewest prime-time viewers in two decades. According to Nielsen data, CBS averaged 5.6 million viewers, NBC, 4.7 million, ABC, 4.5 million and Fox, 4.1 million.

About the same time, The New York Times reported that ratings for the U.S. network news shows were down for the second quarter of this year. Both ABC and CBS had record low numbers for their evening news programs. Even NBC, which has led in the supper-time news race for several years, had historic low numbers.

These two news items were widely and gleefully reported online. Well, of course. Any time old media are shown to suffer, online news sources high-five each other and predict the imminent death of newspapers, TV, magazines and, for all I know, the use of pens and pencils worldwide.

That’s it then. Spain beat The Netherlands in a game that was persistently scrappy until extra-time. There were countess fouls. The main Dutch plan, facing Spanish artistry, was to kick at ankles, tug shirts, and manhandle opposing players. But Spain won – a victory of grace and technique over muscle and force. All good, really.

But that’s not the dominant story, is it? Certainly not in Canada and the United States. Soccer might have a new Word Cup champion, but some things never change.

A month of madness ends this weekend with the biggest television event on the planet. Yep, that World Cup thing will end, with hundreds of millions of people watching the final. Life becomes tedious for a while, until the European soccer season starts. No, wait. That’s just me. There are a few non-sports shows this weekend, but not many. CBC ends its World Cup coverage with Popsicle Soccer Day in Canada on CBC (noon). A Toronto FC game is followed by the third-place game from South Africa (Uruguay against Germany, 2:30 p.m.) and then, women’s soccer from Nova Scotia, Quebec and Alberta, including the famous Giddy Up Cup, part of the Calgary Stampede. The menu is this – the greatest show on Earth and two good things for non-sports fans.