A life now high, far, and gone. A voice that resonates forever.

“The first thing I felt and that got me was how much he would have loved this,” Suzyn Waldman thought to herself Tuesday night, when Sterling’s life was celebrated at Yankee Stadium. Waldman, the Boston native turned longtime Sterling radio partner, likened the pall over the crowd to “the sound of grief,” at least until it was punctuated by a perfect voice from the stands who said, “That’s baseball, Suzyn.”

That it is. It’s also local broadcasting.

What Sterling represented is such an important piece of our sporting equation and speaks directly to the reason his death resonated across an entire sport. The connection between organizations and their local fan bases is bridged by the voices that call the games night in and night out, by the personalities that visit our living rooms, car radios, or backyard barbecues with their unique rhythms, introductions, and catchphrases.

Johnny Most saying hello “from high above courtside.“ Curt Gowdy introducing himself with, “Hi neighbor, have a ’Gansett.” The Big, Bad Bruins brought to you by Fred Cusick and Johnny Peirson on television or the legendary pipes of Bob Wilson on radio. Ken Coleman describing Carl Yastrzemski’s catch in 1967 in Yankee Stadium to save (at the time) Billy Rohr’s no-hitter.

“It’s the soundtrack of your life,” Waldman said. “It keeps you connected to your family. I hear it in my mind — I can always bring up Ken Coleman in ’67, Jose Tartabull throwing out Ken Berry in Chicago. This is 1967, and I can still hear it. It’s the connection to your grandfather and your father and your mother and your child. It’s the connection because when you hear those voices you’re back in that time. It keeps you connected and it’s very local. It’s really local.”

Given the current age of fractured broadcasting, with multiple national outlets both on traditional television and various streaming services, that “localness” has never mattered more. Those voices get us. They know the routes we drive to get to the stadiums. They speak our language, drink our beers, and frequent our restaurants. They are us.

“There’s a comfort level,” said Tom Caron, who has made a home at NESN for the past 35 years and hosts pre- and postgame Red Sox coverage. “I grew up in an era where Ned Martin was the voice of the Red Sox on NESN, and it was Ned, Bob Montgomery, and Jerry Remy. They were part of the family. You’d put them on every night, it was the soundtrack of the summer.”

For Caron, it was sitting on the shore of Maine’s Sebago Lake, transistor radio on, his dad sometimes scoring the game by hand. “I don’t remember a summer growing up where the Red Sox weren’t in the background,” he said.

For me, it was Opening Day, smuggling that transistor into my school bag to listen to the Yankees, back when the Phil Rizzuto/Frank Messer/Bill White trio authored my soundtrack, laughing as Rizzuto missed the final few pitches to beat the traffic home. For my dad, it was Mel Allen speaking blocks away from his family’s New York City apartment, or Marty Glickman keeping him up to date with the Giants. Wherever you lived, there was a voice to carry you. Vin Scully, Chick Hearn, Bob Uecker, Harry Kalas.

And of course, Most.

“Havlicek stole the ball!”

As colleague Dan Shaughnessy reminded me, that call made its way onto the recording charts. An actual vinyl record. “We all memorized it,” Dan said, while also quoting McNasty and McFilthy, the interchangeable Most nicknames for Rick Mahorn and Jeff Ruland.

As Waldman recalled, “Red [Auerbach] told me this once, that, ‘I said to him, Johnny, I want you to teach the city of Boston about basketball and about Celtic basketball. There are heroes and there are villains and that’s what it is.’ Red wanted him to do that. We hated the Pistons because Johnny Most told us to.”

I remembered so many Yankee home runs because Sterling told me how. From “Bern baby Bern,” the original impromptu salute to Bernie Williams, to “El Capitan” for Red Sox nemesis Derek Jeter, for the New York audience, Sterling was a consummate treasure. For me, he was also a friend, an avid reader, not only of newspapers such as The Bergen Record that employed me for two decades, but literature of all kinds. He was one of one, a true original, as liable to quote a Broadway show as he was to call a double play. He will be missed, though not forgotten. The Yankees should add his plaque to their Monument Park.

But the truth is, cities and towns everywhere have their Sterling, and are the better for it.