ABC’s ‘The Bachelorette’ comes to Wildwood, but contestant Tyler Norris is dumped on the boardwalk

It felt like the saddest episode of Jersey Shore ever.

The much-anticipated hometown date episode of ABC’s The Bachelorette, in which pilot and co-bachelorette Rachel Recchia visited Wildwood, the home of mini-hoops-game operator Tyler Norris, aired Monday night, but it ended in disaster for Norris.

A tearful Recchia cut the boyish Norris loose, even as he was innocently professing his love for her on an old-timey, wrought-iron Wildwood bench. Shockingly, she declined even to go on to visit his family, waiting patiently in the living room of their home off-shore.

The Boardwalk life was through for her, barely after it began.

“I feel like I am going to throw up,” she’s heard saying behind a closed door of a restroom in a Boardwalk restaurant.

Recchia then took a fast exit in awaiting SUV, a liquor store in the background, hugging her trench coat tight against the chilly spring night, high-tailing it out of town like she was trying to make last call up at Keenan’s in North Wildwood.

For local hero Norris, and his fans, it was a shockingly abrupt end.

“Justice for Tyler,” wrote one fan on Instagram. “And Curley’s fries.”

“Rachel just couldn’t handle #Wildwood, had nothing to do with Tyler,” said Fun Games Joe on Twitter.

It had all started so right, with Wildwood and its big sign and bouncy beach ball motif looking spiffy in an opening montage, with perfect shots of boats in the inlet, the Wildwood Historical Society museum, Morey’s Piers, Curley’s Fries, the Hot Spot, and a bucolic beach behind Rachel during her interviews.

The opened-just-for-the-filming Boardwalk welcomed Recchia and Norris like old friends, against a chilly late April air.

» READ MORE: Bachelorette seen filming on Wildwood Boardwalk

And there were lots of old friends, enthusing over Recchia from behind the counter at the Hot Spot, “bombarding her,” in that Jersey way, as one friend acknowledged.

There was Joe, his best friend’s Sal’s dad, his friend Katie, and Lizzie and Katie’s sister Lauren. Another friend walked into the shot with a huge hug. Tyler told her later he wasn’t expecting everyone to show up at the Hot Spot.

It was a lot.

The Florida resident seemed a bit overwhelmed. Or maybe she was just thinking about the other remaining contestants: Zach, Tino, and Aven.

Still, they soldiered on through a medley of Wildwood experiences. They ate corn dogs at The Hot Spot, and shot hoops at the Boardwalk game Norris owns. They rode bumper cars, strapped in on the carousel, and enthused over funnel cake.

The rides at Morey’s Pier were inviting backdrops. All seemed well.

But after Norris told her he lived in an apartment attached to his game, then noisily “closed up,” the gate on the pink building and turned around like a puppy dog waiting for a hug, things started to go sour. Lime Rickey sour.

“So my house is like right over the bridge,” he told her. “And then my apartment during the summer when I worked up here, it’s an apartment attached like with my game.”

She headed to confide to a producer, never a good sign.

On the breakup bench, he took a long time to read the signs. He told her, “I am so in love with you.”

“I feel lucky to know you,” she told him.

Her eyes are brimming, and she turns away, but he keeps talking.

“Wait wait wait,” she says.

And then he gets ... the speech. She’s not ready to meet his family.

“I don’t know if I’m going to get there with you,” she says.

Norris rallied a bit, and told her it meant a lot to him that she was thinking about his family, and “I wouldn’t want to put them in that position.”

“The fact that you were able to like let me, you know, love again, that means so much to me,” he told her.

They took a last hug, the water slide behind them.

Meanwhile, waiting just over the bridge, his mom says, “I just have this feeling he’s going to walk in with a smile from one ear to another.”

She recalls him saying, “I’ll see youse in a couple months with my soon-to-be wife Rachel.”

But it was not to be. Should have taken her during summer, Tyler.

Norris was not the only Jersey contestant in Monday’s hometown dates. Co-bachelorette Gabby Windrey had two of three finalists with Jersey ties: Erich Schwer, who courted Windrey in a very un-Wildwood like Bedminster, and Johnny DePhillipo, whose hometown is Palm Beach, Fla., but who grew up in Margate, N.J.