For the past two years, WCBSFM has been the Walter O’Malley of radio stations.

Maybe it didn’t take the Dodgers out of Brooklyn, but it sure whacked the joy out of New York’s airwaves when it ditched its beloved oldies format and replaced it with something called “Jack FM.” Out went the Platters; in came all those groups who had hits in the ’80s. You know … uh … those groups, those hits.

There were some hits in the ’80s, weren’t there?

Far worse than just tossing the tunes, however, WCBS tossed its humanity: its deejays. “Cousin Brucie,” Harry Harrison, Dan Ingram, and others — all New York institutions — were dumped like the magic lamp mistaken for old junk. Instead, the station interspersed its new mishmash of songs with quips prerecorded in Canada.

These had all the local flavor of a Hot Pocket. And believe it or not, this was supposedly the beauty of Jack: It was just like an iPod, albeit one programmed by some guy far away with bad taste and zero personality. What’s not to like?

Besides every single second, I mean? The station stank, shrank, sank. And this explains why, next week, it is switching back to its former format and hoping all is forgiven.

Is it?

“New Yorkers are very nonforgiving,” Bruce Morrow — aka Cousin Brucie — said in that flannel martini voice of his.

For a couple of generations, Mr. Morrow was second family to a wide swath of New Yorkers. “When Cousin Brucie was on the radio — and I’m on the radio now, I’m on Sirius — I’m a friend. I talk to people,” Mr. Morrow said (sometimes in the third person). “You’d be in your car, or the bathroom, or the bed, and you’d have a friend with you.” Him, that is. As CBS was showing him the door, Mr. Morrow said, “I warned them: You don’t fool with the culture of New York City.”

They learned that the hard way. Since the switch in June of ’05, WCBS-FM has dropped to 16th place in the local market from eighth. Revenues have slumped 30%. And anyone still paying attention seems just tickled by the plunge.

“From the day they did it, it was a message that boomers are no longer relevant,” Marty Appel, the Yankees’ publicist from 1968 to 1991, said. “I gave it [Jack] a few weeks’ trial — the Katie Couric trial period — and it just didn’t resonate for me. So it drove me to buy an iPod and load it up with the music I love.” (Particularly the “Bristol Stomp,” by the Dovells.)

So much for Jack being the iPod killer. And really, does it make any sense for radio to fight the iPod by being an unprogrammable version of it? That’s like fighting TV by offering people shoeboxes with a picture of Teri Hatcher glued inside. Radio should fight back with its strength, the human touch.

“There’s nothing as attractive as the idea of somebody presenting the music to you,” the publisher of the radio magazine Talkers, Michael Harrison, said. “Great disc jockeys made the music sound better by giving it meaning.”

And the WCBS disc jockeys were some of the greatest.

“They’d go, ‘Do you remember this? Oh my gosh, this was one of our tops songs back in the ’60s. Frankie Valli never sounded better!'” the author of “Punk Marketing,” Richard Laermer, recalled. “It was patter, real patter, and very New York. Getting rid of them was like tearing down the Empire State Building.”

Well, now it’s being rebuilt. News reports say that starting Monday, Dan Taylor will be hosting 101.1’s morning show, followed by Bob Shannon at midday and Broadway Bill Lee during the afternoon drive. Mr. Morrow still has a year on his contract with Sirius, but left numerous doors wide open with statements like “It’s a very unusual business” and “Every day something happens.” That it does. And sometimes, when it’s something good, we’re even willing to forgive.