It didn’t take long for a tweet sent yesterday just after 5 p.m. by Washington City Paper writer Alan Suderman to arouse suspicion that something was amiss at the alt-weekly. “Exceedingly sad day for @wcp. That is all,” Suderman wrote in the message which was quickly pounced upon for its ominous tone.

A few minutes later, City Paper editor-in-chief Michael Schaffer told Post media columnist Erik Wemple (his predecessor at City Paper) that longtime sportswriter Dave McKenna is stepping down after 26 years with the publication.

McKenna’s departure comes as a jolt not just to City Paper readers, but to anyone who follows the region’s sports journalism. But his long tenure there might be remembered best for its most recent chapter—the lawsuit filed by Redskins owner Dan Snyder over a November 2010 cover story titled “The Cranky Redskins Fan to Dan Snyder,” an encyclopedic and entirely factual takedown of a miserable decade of professional football. Snyder eventually dropped the suit in September; McKenna kept reporting on the team and its litigious owner throughout the entire process.

Still, McKenna’s decision yesterday to leave his longtime perch appears to be driven by the changing dynamic of the City Paper’s news-gathering operation.

“His column was getting more and more difficult to do,” says Mike Madden, City Paper’s managing editor. “I think he decided it was enough. The job changed to the point where it wasn’t fun anymore.”

Though Madden says the financial situation of City Paper’s parent company, Creative Loafing Inc., was not a factor in McKenna’s leaving, the alt-weekly has in recent months been relying more upon its full-time staff and reducing its freelance expenditures. (As a City Paper freelancer since April 2010, I have been aware of this shift in the workload.) Madden also says there was no animus in McKenna’s decision.

McKenna’s departure also adds to the number of postions the City Paper needs to fill. The paper has been looking to hire a web producer, while the assistant managing editor postion has been vacant since the summer when Michael Grass (a former DCist editor) left to launch Huffington Post’s D.C. vertical.

“The paper’s still doing excellent work,” Madden says. “There’s always some personnel flux that places have to deal with and we may not wind up with the various positions and titles we had before those various people left.”

But with a quarter-century of prying open the District’s sports world under his belt, McKenna is something of an institutional pillar for the alt-weekly.

“Dave’s work is in and of itself irreplaceable, and even if we had an unlimited budget, there’s only one McKenna,” Madden says. “We will continue to find ways to get sports coverage into the paper because that’s obviously intrinsic to the culture of the city.”

Though much of the conversation about McKenna will undoubtedly focus on the recent affair with Snyder, his career at City Paper spanned much more, as Schaffer noted in a newsroom email:

In a way, it’s a shame that the last year has been so defined by Dave’s bravery in the face of legal threats from a billionaire celebrity, because so much of the real magic in his column was his ability to discover and champion the powerless and the forgotten. Yes, he’s often seemed to be the only one questioning the most powerful sports juggernaut in town. But when you go through his collected works, also look for one-armed superstar catcher Gary Mays, Kentucky Derby winner turned $8-a-race Laurel Park pony boy Ronnie Franklin, and the schoolgirl athletes whose sorry treatment Dave chronicled.

“I remember reading his work in City Paper when I was in high school and it’ll be a big change not running it,” says Madden, who grew up in Montgomery County.

In his final Cheap Seats column, in print today, McKenna adds a postscript to his long career with City Paper:

I’m grateful for all the people who told me their stories, and anybody who ever read my attempts to retell those tales in this space, and, well, anybody who didn’t read but sued me anyway.

McKenna’s column today is his Unsportsman of the Year Award. The winner? Dan Snyder, of course.