Bye, Katie, we love ya ... and so on

KATIE COURIC’S “Today” show farewell, after 15 years, was basically one of those office cake ceremonies. You know, everyone standing around in awkward repose as the guest of honor promises to come visit so much “you guys’ll be sick of me” and eventually everyone trudges back to their desks to resume surfing the Net and wonder what exactly it is they’re doing with their own lives.

Certainly Katie knows what she’s been doing with hers and has the video montages to prove it. The tributes continuing into the third hour, her final “Today” was overlong with the stuff and overwrought, with nary a mention of “The CBS Evening News” and early-shift rapprochement with former co-host Bryant Gumbel.

There were, of course, salutes to her hairstyles, clips that proved she’d gotten tough with real-world figures, live performances that proved she has celebrity friends (Tony Bennett, Martina McBride).

There were also appearances that proved Katie has touched people who have in turn touched her back. Trisha Meili, the recovered Central Park jogger, is one of them, but so, in a different way, is Joan Rivers.

One of the leitmotifs of Couric’s career has been Dorothy of “The Wizard of Oz,” and Wednesday they all gathered on the pedestal to wave at her, so many Scarecrows and Tin Men and Cowardly Lions, as she was whisked back to Kansas (in reality CBS headquarters in Midtown, where she’ll become anchor of “The CBS Evening News”).

“Beneath this well-dressed exterior lies a huge and loving heart,” Katie-as-Dorothy said about Matt Lauer. As for Al Roker, she talked about his “light-filled joie de vivre, which is only matched by extraordinary depth.”

Al’s weather on this day was sponsored by the upcoming movie “The Devil Wears Prada.” Discuss. It’s easy to imagine a horrible diva behind this wholesome goodness, but like Oprah Winfrey, Couric through sheer force of personality can transmute mawkish tastelessness into populism, self-interest into acts of pay-it-forward kindness.

The woman who went to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to bring it all home (Katie’s first time wearing hip-waders) is also the woman who, following the death of her husband to colon cancer, gamely had her own colon scoped live and on the air, in a successful campaign to prompt her TV audience to do the same.

Some were on hand Wednesday to credit Couric with saving their lives. However true this may be, you couldn’t help thinking that their doctors too, might have had something to do with it.

“I think what’s most amazing is that you’ve held America’s hands through a lot of very difficult times,” Ann Curry told her.

Ted Koppel, a more sober hand-holder, completed his long run as “Nightline” anchor in November by re-airing an oft-requested 1995 interview he did with retired Brandeis professor Morrie Schwartz, a colloquy about life and the dying process that propelled one of Schwartz’s ex-students, sportswriter Mitch Albom, toward the bestselling book “Tuesdays With Morrie.”

For Koppel, it was a vintage show-don’t-tell approach to TV journalism, moving and subtle and maybe a bit haughty in its steadfast refusal to take us back through the years. But on a morning show you can emote until your smile hurts and the Coldplay sound bites have been exhausted and there, finally, is Gene Shalit, in his bow tie, a sight for sore eyes.