Huge crowds at Bernie’s near-daily outdoor rallies inside New York City parks over the last week created compelling optics that suggested his campaign was ready to spring a big Empire State upset.

Instead, Senator Sanders got hit with a knockout punch to the gut from Hillary and a loyal New York state Democratic Party establishment which quietly delivered a 16-point victory.

Bernie spent much of the last three weeks in New York City but got totally creamed in all five boroughs. Sanders got rock star receptions from energetic young supporters who stood in line for hours to see his standard stump yet he lost NYC by an amazing 25 points.

How do you reconcile all the commotion and excitement about Bernie in the form of unmistakably loud and very public displays of support with his lousy showing at the polls?

The red flag for me came in the days leading up to primary election day (yesterday). Bernie and his campaign joined a chorus of supporters on social media in groaning about New York state’s primary election process. One must be a registered member of a party to participate in one’s party primary election – and there’s no fluidity or flexibility to accessing the process unless you have some recorded history with the party.

So, in this contest, if you were registered as anything but a Democrat (including the stated preference of “I do not wish to enroll in a party”), you couldn’t vote for either Hillary or Bernie or any of their aligned delegates unless you changed your party affiliation to “Democratic” in the prior calendar year. The only other way in was if you were completely unregistered prior to all of this – and registered fresh as “Democratic” by March 30, 2016.

That’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s been here for a long time. If you consider yourself a member of one of this country’s two major parties, and you want to be politically active within that framework, that’s how it works.

If you want to go off the reservation – and join the Greens – or in this state – the Working Families party – that’s totally cool. But if you do that, you sit out Bernie vs. Hillary – and you wait to make your hay in the general (when it’s too late). Unfortunately, I think a lot of the loud Bernie backers couldn’t tangibly help him to victory given their very noble efforts to fight the system via third party options. They finally got their guy – yet they couldn’t vote for him.

They didn’t see him coming a year ago and they couldn’t do anything about it other than go to his rallies once they did.

This is all anecdotal – of course. I haven’t seen hard research examining this. The polls had Hillary up 12 state-wide and she ran it up into blowout territory.

In her primary run against Andy Cuomo just two years ago, longshot Zephyr Teachout outperformed what Bernie mustered in Manhattan Tuesday by a sizable percentage of the total Dem votes cast.

I don’t really see any injustice – or anything un-democratic with a lower case D about the closed primary. The parties want their own members advancing a nominee – not those outside their philosophical approach – however stale or shitty it may be.

Bernie chose to run as a Democrat knowing the process. He knew the establishment is tough to buckle. He knew his supporters faced rigid, unavoidable voting constraints. Set aside the obscene money Hillary is getting from unsavory check-writers, the Dem’s primary process here is not rigged.

I mean, I guess it IS titled very much in favor of the major party player in terms of advantages within the delegate scoring system. But Bernie and his people knew the rules going in and they shouldn’t act indignant about eligibility a couple days before the election.

As far as the reports that NYC Board of Elections failed to pull off their job on the big day, that’s not a surprise. It happens every election day here. It’s a brutally ineffective organization that has actually gotten a little better in the last cycle or two but has a long ways to go.

My voting experience at a charter school in the neighborhood was seamless. I was in and out in under five minutes.

I didn’t feel intense sensations or emotions as I often do when I vote because of Bernie’s badly blown gun votes – and resignation about Hillary’s inevitability. But going to the polling place is one task I never pass up given the grandeur of the one person, one vote concept.

As I’ve done now since casting my first Democratic Presidential Primary vote for the Rev. Jackson in 1984 (followed by Jackson again in ’88, Jerry Brown in ’92, Bill Bradley in 2000 and Dennis Kucinich in 2004), I will come back home and support the party’s nominee despite liking another guy better in each of the years cited.

No sour grapes about Bernie’s performance here. He livened up the conversation and pushed the party’s nominee leftward. Now, if only all those people who pushed so hard to feel the Bern can learn from the process and be ready to work more effectively within it when it rolls around again in four years.