We all lost a national treasure recently. Some of you may not have noticed, but you can trust me when I say many of us feel terrible about what happened.

“Jersey Shore” finished its short season on MTV.

I can’t believe we only got to know The Situation, Snookie and the gang a couple of months ago. They already seem like old friends. I don’t know how much fun I will have with them gone.

Oh, they will probably continue to pop up in entertainment media once in a while. Some of them might even find a way to stay in the spotlight, but it won’t be the same. (We now know there will be a second season. I love this country.)

At least we’ll have the memories of eight episodes, which will live in reruns until something else distracts us. And the many online special interviews which MTV unfurled once they realized they had a hit on their hands.

I don’t know why they didn’t react more quickly. Everyone I knew who followed pop culture and reality TV predicted that the show would do great the moment it was announced.

For years, television executives thought that if you put a bunch of stereotyped people with different personalities in a house together, great television would follow. That worked sometimes, but began to fail more often than not when savvy people figured out how to game the system in order to get more than their 15 minutes of fame.

“Jersey Shore” flipped the reality TV model on its head and put eight people who were, at least on the surface, exactly the same in a house. I don’t think the network realized the genius of this idea until the ratings came in.

Sure, the cast members do not provide the greatest example for our youth, but they provide plenty of entertainment. That’s what reality TV is all about, right?

I used to watch some reality shows when the genre first hit the airwaves, but slowly found myself uninterested in the people begging for attention on camera.

The ridiculous attempts by the shows on MTV to pretend they were seeking people who wanted to better understand each other when all they really wanted was conflict turned me off as well.

So this time they found a cast which had to look at the other people in the house and see a little bit of themselves. That bred a new kind of conflict which, at least for me, truly entertained.

Of course the catch phrases, the fist pumping, the ridiculous outfits and the unique vocabulary kept me coming back for more.

Some people didn’t like “Jersey Shore.” One Italian-American group protested loudly. A few sponsors pulled their ads from the show. People around the shore town during the month of filming badgered the cast.

All that just made me love the show even more. Life isn’t always pretty. I’m not saying I want my daughter to grow up to be like JWowww, or that PaulyD is my idea of a great son-in-law, but the show made me laugh. That’s what matters to me in the long run.

Now if I could just figure out how to fix my hair like some of those guys so I can go have some fun at the shore.