I live about ten minutes away from the Smithsonian National Zoo, and I don’t think that in all the times I have been there I’ve ever seen a single panda. Oh, sure, I’ve seen their enclosure; it’s essentially a ground-level Metro station—all concrete and glass, decorated with a few sprigs of bamboo to suggest the abstraction Panda—but never have I glimpsed the creatures which Barack Obama once claimed “dazzle” the children of America.

Not that it matters anymore. Last week, in the middle of the night, zoo employees drugged the three pandas on loan from China, packed them in FedEx trucks, and shipped them back to the People’s Republic. Some have compared their departure to that fateful night in 1984 when the Baltimore Colts picked up their helmets and pads and fled for Indianapolis. But I think the more appropriate analogy is the O.J. Simpson chase. The morning of Nov. 7, every news helicopter in the Washington area followed those FedEx trucks as they trundled with a police escort down to Dulles Airport.

The coverage was breathless, and for native Washingtonians, it was impossible to look away. We have panda statues all over this town; we slap their faces on t-shirts and birthday cakes. Somewhere along the way, it seems, we forgot that they didn’t really belong to us. Their departure was fittingly billed as a catastrophe in slow motion, the instantiation of a tearing in relations between two great powers.