Everything ends. But even if you feel it approaching, the finale can still stun you into utter shock.

That’s how it feels to see the 18-year tenure of Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh come to a swift, unceremonious conclusion. This is the way the tenure of the longest-serving coach in Baltimore professional sports history ends — not with a bang, but with a tweet.

Harbaugh’s gravitas in the Castle had some real heft, like a long-haul train steadily chugging along, carried by successes and wins, but also by pure inertia. His departure from Owings Mills feels like that train slamming on the brakes, wheels squealing and sparking from the suddenness of the halt.

As much as any player, Harbaugh has been the face of the Ravens for two decades, but patience had been wearing thin. Based on an 8-9 season that started off with Super Bowl expectations, there are Ravens fans very understandably celebrating the end of Harbaugh’s time at the reins.

Even more of the faithful were fed up with a sense of a malaise. Over the last three years, the team had declined from an AFC championship game berth, to a divisional round loss, to out of the playoffs entirely.

Many in Baltimore will view this move as shaking loose a leader who had not just hit a ceiling, but gotten less and less out of the Lamar Jackson era. To many fans, the possibility of a new epoch with a younger, more-cutting edge coach feels like the clean air you breathe in after a rainstorm clears.

While I think there is real merit to firing Harbaugh — and while it signals a bold, hell-bent-on-winning-it-all approach from owner Steve Bisciotti — I take a more sober view of the situation.

Harbaugh was in Baltimore so long that fans got to know every one of his flaws and warts. Like a spouse in a long marriage, the frustrations with Harbaugh eventually became more pronounced than his steady churn of playoff seasons.

With the benefit of time and distance, I think Harbaugh’s run with the Ravens will be remembered much more fondly, perhaps even with reverence, than it is in the midst of the breakup.

There may not be a coach in the NFL (other than possibly Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin, who stands alone with his 19 years coaching the Steelers) who has such a stark difference between his reputation within his home market versus outside of it. While there are some Ravens fans undoubtedly dancing in the street after Tuesday’s breaking news, friends outside of Baltimore quickly sent me texts wondering why Bisciotti would cut ties with such a competent, accomplished head coach.

“Who’s better available?” one friend texted me — a question that I’m not sure everyone who called for Harbaugh’s head for years fully appreciates.

From the time Harbaugh was hired in 2008, 95 men have gotten their start as head coaches in the NFL. Only 11 of them have better winning percentages than Harbaugh (and there’s plenty of time for first-year success stories Liam Coen and Ben Johnson to fall back to earth).

In this league, NFL owners are much more likely to hire the next flash in the pan who fizzles out than the next Hall of Famer. Today’s hotshot coordinators are tomorrow’s retreads.

For 18 years, Harbaugh defied that trend.

What Harbaugh gave the Ravens for 18 years was insulation from the endless churn of the coaching carousel. He helped define a standard with teams that routinely went to the playoffs (12 out of 18 seasons) and won the AFC North six times.

Even though many people believe the Ravens were talented enough to win more than one Lombardi Trophy in his tenure, Harbaugh was good enough to field teams that were contending threats across an almost unthinkably long span. The teams he lost to almost always had generationally great quarterbacks: Brady, Manning, Roethlisberger, Mahomes and Allen.

The Super Bowl he won was a special, special run, capped by a game the Ravens led by 22 points in the third quarter. Chances are that some of your favorite Ravens memories — the Mile High Miracle, the Colts comeback, wins over the prime-era Steelers and Patriots — had Harbaugh on the sideline.

When he was hired, it was perfectly acceptable to question the wisdom of hiring a special teams coordinator who had no specific offensive or defensive expertise. But that turned out to allow him to adapt to his roster and NFL trends. Harbaugh won with Joe Flacco, and he won with Lamar Jackson — two epically different styles of quarterback. He won with blitzing defenses, with conservative defenses, and oversaw cutting-edge trends like simulated pressures.

Somehow through these evolutions, the character of the Ravens was remarkably consistent: physical, gritty, fastidiously detailed, hard as hell to beat at home. The willingness to adapt, combined with a coherent sense of identity and winning, is a sign of good coaching.

But even good coaches lose their edge, and clear signs emerged this season. The offense was spotty and rigid, and the defense couldn’t rush the passer or play convincing coverage in the fourth quarter. The special teams — long the envy of the league — had fallen off over the last few years. The Ravens’ propensity for losing double-digit leads late in games had become an unfortunate hallmark.

The Ravens weren’t going to return to form without significant change. And firing John Harbaugh is the most significant change you can make, short of trading a two-time MVP (which I would not advise). It’s appropriately proactive for the Ravens to get ahead of what they see as a coach on the decline.

But don’t let the finish completely color Harbaugh’s tenure. As recently as 2023, the Ravens were wrecking the league’s best teams in their regular season run. They were maybe a Zay Flowers fumble away from going to another Super Bowl, and if that happens, maybe Harbaugh is still sitting in his Owings Mills office, secure as any head coach in the NFL.

When Harbaugh was hired, I was a 19-year-old college sophomore writing into the abyss of a fan blog that the Ravens should promote Rex Ryan as their head coach. Nearly two decades later, I’m a columnist in my late 30s thinking about all the time that has passed, all the coaches around the NFL who have been hired and fired, all the games the Ravens won — the scope of time that passed in the interim is breathtaking if you try to think about it all at once.

When I try to take it all in, I admit I can’t help but get a little nostalgic for an era that defined so many of our lives as Ravens fans. At least now, I can finally admit I was wrong back in college, all those years ago.

You could argue just a handful of moments and plays (if Lee Evans didn’t drop that pass or Billy Cundiff didn’t miss that field goal?) separated Harbaugh from being one of the most successful coaches in NFL history. As it was, he is merely the greatest head coach the Ravens ever had.

While it lasted, that was pretty good, too.