Cue the opening montage. Something dramatic, this is Alabama vs. Georgia for the SEC championship. Nick vs. Kirby. The history. The stakes.

Slow fade to black.

Cut to the blimp shot.

Roll that theme … one more time.

An era will end Saturday when that jingle that’s become part of our DNA fills our living rooms one final time. The SEC on CBS has been almost elemental for a few generations who’ve come to age with Uncles Verne, Gary and more recently, Brad.

The SEC Championship will be the finale on the league’s finale on the network before the ESPN brand fully conquers the conference. No longer will the Disney empire have to choose from the CBS leftovers of the 3:30 (or 2:30) as the mid-afternoon primetime slot.

This ends a relationship dating back to 1996 when the SEC and Big East shared time. The SEC became the exclusive partner a few years later.

And you knew, once that introduction began, there was something different about the broadcast quality when CBS rolled into town. Whether it be the dramatic drone shots that established the extraordinary settings or the various angles from inside the given SEC stadium, production value never lacked.

“What stands out about this conference is the passion of the fans demand perfection,” veteran analyst Gary Danielson said in an interview with AL.com before the season. “It’s impossible to give it, but they demand it. They demand perfection from the facilities to the parking, to the uniforms, to how their players act off the field … you can’t ask for more than that as a broadcaster.”

Well … let’s talk about that for a minute.

Because no conversation about the SEC on CBS is complete (or even started) without the fan’s relationship with the broadcasters in the booth.

They obviously hate everyone’s favorite team and show constant bias in that regard, is the gist of these complaints. It’s interesting because other networks and their broadcast teams don’t get the same chorus of complaints about their team’s treatment, but that’s just part of this unique relationship.

The CBS games were the ones that mattered most so tensions were already high. Also consider the crew didn’t alternate like ESPN’s army of booth teams so Danielson and Verne Lundquist and now Brad Nessler became first-name acquaintances whose favor could rise and fall with the score on the screen.

More often, it fell.

Danielson is aware.

“The only part I regret,” he said, “is after the game, most of it would be about me and it was bad. We have 70 people who come to do this game. The best camera people CBS has. The people who put on The Masters do the SEC game. Our veteran people on the truck who fly in from all over the country and then (fans) turn on their phones and it’s about me. I hate that. I hate that part of it. I get it. It’s not about me, I’ve lived with that as a player and can handle all that but it takes away from Brad’s work and Craig’s (Silver, the executive producer) work.”

Danielson remembers going on the Paul Finebaum Show to fight back at the “Uncle Verne” nickname given to his old teammate because it didn’t originate from a place of love.

Lundquist, who retired from the SEC broadcast in 2016, remains a loyal viewer every fall afternoon.

“First of all, I love the SEC,” Lundquist said in a recent interview with AL.com “It’s the greatest assignment I was ever given in my life.”

He won’t be watching Saturday, Lundquist said, because he was invited to attend the final SEC on CBS broadcast in Atlanta.

“I can’t wait,” Lundquist said. “It’s going to be sad — not sad — emotional for all of our guys because Craig Silver has been doing this for over 30 years.”

Silver’s not a household name but this proud son from the state of New Jersey takes great pride in leaving his mark in the deep south.

The coordinating producer for the SEC on CBS, Silver’s been with the network since 1981 and the entirety of the run with the Southeastern Conference. He’s the head coach of the broadcast and Silver takes great pride in his team’s ability to adjust on the fly during a chaotic broadcast that never skips a beat.

Preparation is a week-long enterprise and that includes the meetings with both head coaches as game day approaches. Given Alabama’s place in the hierarchy, that means significant face time with Nick Saban. Silver said he’s had the opportunity to see a side of Saban most don’t.

“I would say this, he likes to engage in interesting conversation,” Silver said. “I think working with Gary and Brad and Verne over the years, he has embraced that with us because these guys speak football and life at a high level and he likes that. He’s been very generous with us.”

They’ll get one more sit down this week before kickoff at 3 p.m. CT Saturday in Atlanta.

And if there’s one thing that unites the SEC viewership outside of nonsensical complaints of bias, it’s that theme song. Back in August, CBS caused an uproar with a promo for its new relationship with the Big Ten. Weaving clips from Ohio State, Minnesota and others, that jingle played and it, frankly, felt weird.

That’s just how close the association has become between CBS and the SEC. Most would be stunned to learn that song debuted as the intro to the Super Bowl XXI in 1987. Written and recorded by Lloyd Landesman, the jingle moved to the CBS coverage of college football later that year, according to USA Today.

“The way it’s composed, it sounds like college football,” CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus told the newspaper in 2013. “It probably wouldn’t be appropriate for NFL football or other pro sports, but it really sounds like a Saturday afternoon.”

And it will continue in that role, just more so in the Midwest than the southeast moving forward.

Danielson, Nessler and Silver aren’t fading away, just going north as the billion-dollar winds of broadcast rights shifted in the most significant change in decades.

No longer will the 3:30 Eastern, 2:30 Central timeslot be the center of gravity within the SEC broadcast schedule. It’ll be an ESPN/ABC/SEC Network monopoly moving forward and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said the plan is to spread the league’s top game among the three major time slots.

It will rob some of the prestige associated with being picked for that midafternoon slot on CBS.

No doubt fans will celebrate the end of Danielson. Perhaps they’ll learn to appreciate his insights and attention to detail when he’s gone.

But this is progress.

And money talks.

So, here’s to one more SEC afternoon on the CBS eye.

One more opening theme before it becomes nostalgia in the latest wave of progress.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.