Local moviegoers were greeted recently by thesad newsthat the Cinemark movie theater chain would be closing its San Francisco Centre 9 and XD theater in San Francisco’s Westfield mall. From a general perspective, it was simply the latest installment in the steady and ominous drip, drip, drip that’s seeing movie houses disappear from the Bay Area landscape.

It wasn’t even a particularly consequential closure, really. That theater didn’t count as a significant cultural landmark like Landmark’s Embarcadero Center Cinema, which shut downlast year, or the Castro Theatre, which remainsembroiled in a civic and commercial battleover its future.

But it held a special significance for this opera lover. For years, the Westfield San Francisco Centre movie theater has been my go-to spot for “The Met: Live in HD,” the Metropolitan Opera’s immersive and often ravishing high-definition simulcasts from New York City.

So, yeah, this one hurts.

It’s not as though there aren’t alternative options. Simulcasts from the Met stream into 1,800 theaters worldwide, including three others in San Francisco alone (the Kabuki, the Metreon and the Marina Theatre on Chestnut). You can find them in theaters across the Bay Area, from Fremont and Mountain View up to Vallejo and San Rafael.

And it’s not like there was anything irreplaceably special about enjoying an opera by Handel, Verdi or Strauss at the San Francisco Centre. The sound wasn’t any better; neither was the popcorn.

Butlike the riflemen say, even if there were many like it, this one was mine. It’s the locus for my most treasured operatic memories that didn’t take place in an actual opera house.

San Francisco Centre is where I heard sopranoNina Stemmeand tenorStuart Skeltondeliver a ravishing “Tristan und Isolde,” then collapsed into a spate of wholly unexpected tears as the opera’s radiant final chord sounded. It was the site of a jolting “Elektra” with Stemme (again) in the title role andEsa-Pekka Salonenconducting, and an unforgettable production of Philip Glass’ “Akhnaten” featuringcountertenor Anthony Roth Costanzoin the title role.

In those reclining seats, with my feet up like a rec-room dad, I heard Renée Fleming as the Marschallin in Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier,” Jamie Barton’s commanding Fricka in Wagner’s “Die Walküre” (just as wonderful but qualitatively different from the one she had done live at the San Francisco Opera), Peter Mattei’s wrenching account of the title role in Berg’s “Wozzeck” and Nadine Sierra as a heartbreaking, beautifully sung bride in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.”

The Met HD series also introduced me to an array of new work that I would have had to wait a long time to witness in person: Matthew Aucoin’s subtle and affecting “Eurydice,” Nico Muhly’s cheeky take on “Marnie,” and especially “The Exterminating Angel,” Thomas Adès’ extraordinarily virtuosic adaptation of the Luis Buñuel surrealist film classic.

All of those rewards would have been enough in themselves. But even beyond that, the Met’s HD series introduced a new kind of operatic encounter by creating a global audience listening together in real time. To watch these simulcasts is to feel keenly a kinship with all the other opera buffs, from the hard-core aficionados to the newbies, who are having the same experience you are, at the same time. It’s the operatic equivalent of the worldwide viewership that used to be the sole province of things like the Academy Awards.

It’s notable, too, that the advent of operatic simulcasts coincided with the rise of social media. Twitter — even now, in its state of protracted decline — is a natural complement to the HD simulcast, allowing an expansive version of the intermission chitchat that had previously been limited to whoever you ran into in the opera house lobby.

This seems obvious now, but it was a late-dawning realization for me. I’d been attending Met simulcasts for a couple of years before it occurred to me to wade into the virtual green room where younger adepts had been gossiping and arguing from the beginning. (One of my proudest moments was tweeting something about a performance during the first intermission, only to receive a grateful DM from one of the artists during the second.)

Happily, none of this is going away. TheMet HD seasonfor 2023-24 is in place, opening Oct. 21 with Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” and continuing with a variety of traditional and more challenging fare.

The numerous Bay Area theaters still carrying the simulcasts may yet be joined by a new venue. In response to an emailed query, a Met spokesperson wrote, “Since San Francisco is one of the largest markets for our cinema transmissions, we will certainly be looking for a replacement” for the San Francisco Centre. Come fall, the Westfield mall crowd will simply relocate.

Still, when a single location has been the site of so many pleasurable memories, it’s only natural to mourn its passing.

So here’s to you, San Francisco Centre. We had some good times together, didn’t we?

Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com;Twitter:@JoshuaKosman