“The Howard Stern Show,” long in decline, is dead.

In March 2020, when New York City officially went into lockdown, Stern fled to his basement in the Hamptons. Over one year later and now vaccinated, as he first admitted on-air Monday — back from yet another vacation — Stern still has no intention of ever returning to his Midtown studio, his luxury Upper West Side apartment, or any semblance of pre-pandemic life.

The Howard Stern who stayed on air as planes flew into the World Trade Center is unrecognizable.

“Things will never get back to normal,” he declared just two weeks ago. “I do not believe the pandemic will ever be over.”

For a once-constant listener like me, this is heretical, especially here in New York City, where every single neighborhood is struggling to survive. Also, Howard: This pandemic will end, even though you, a germophobic recluse, clearly wish it would not.

But such sentiments have defined Stern’s show and attitude this past year: pessimism, anger, and a worldview that shrinks ever inward, limited in size and scope to The Basement — the literal and metaphorical dwelling place of this once-great show.

Stern, 67, renewed his contract with SiriusXM last December, signing for five years at a reported $120 million per. This is incredible, considering he works three days a week, Monday through Wednesday, broadcasting maybe three hours per day, about 112 shows per year with 253 days off.

That’s a salary of over $1 million per show.

Once upon a time, you could argue that would be fair compensation; after all, one could never predict what Stern would do or say. As memorialized by an analyst in Stern’s 1997 biopic “Private Parts”:

“The average radio listener listens for 18 minutes. The average Howard Stern fan listens for, are you ready for this, an hour and 20 minutes . . . Answer most commonly given? ‘I want to see what he’ll say next.’”

As for those who loathed Stern: “The average Stern hater listens for two and a half hours a day . . . Most common answer? ‘I want to see what he’ll say next.’”

Today, it’s all too easy to predict what Stern will say next. Don’t just take my word for it — endless Reddit threads and Facebook groups are devoted to carbon dating the show’s death, parsing over its comedic breadcrumbs and wondering why Stern even bothers anymore.

Howard Stern, seen here with Robin Quivers in 1992, used to be able to tout massive ratings success. Ron Galella Collection via GettyIndeed, Stern sounds like a guy who should have retired years ago, one begging to be fired, an attempt to end his own misery.

Howard: Your listeners are right there with you. Put us all out of your misery.

Consider a typical show, consisting — on a daily, “Groundhog Day”-like basis — of such content as imitations of his nonagenarian parents and their hearing loss (“What?! What did you say?!”) — as enjoyable as talking to one’s own hard-of-hearing relatives — while revisiting slights and traumas from his childhood yet insisting that decades of three-to-four-day-a-week therapy have made him less angry and more evolved.