With both Super Bowl Sunday and Super Tuesday now come and gone, I find myself strangely dissatisfied. With so much “super” in such a short amount of time, how could this be possible? The Super Bowl was incredible and the various primaries last night were extremely exciting, but I’m still unfulfilled.

Why am I filled with this overwhelming feeling of chagrin? Because it’s only Wednesday and I’ve already forgotten every Super Bowl commercial I saw on Sunday. No matter how hard I rack my brain, I can’t rattle off a single miniscule blip that managed to tease my senses and move my soul.

In other words, the Super Bowl commercials were horribly disappointing.

We all know that there are three reasons people watch the Super Bowl: football, the halftime show and the commercials. The latter is the draw that attracts the people who yell “home run!” on a fumble recovery. These extras tacked onto the biggest game of the year continually draw the largest television audience in the world.

Thus the commercials have become an annual event in and of itself. People still get lost in loving nostalgia while exchanging hilarious tales of the famous Budweiser frogs. Just the mention of the “Mean” Joe Greene Coke ad of 1979 can bring even the mightiest of men to tears.

But there will be no fond recollections of the class of 2008. Grandchildren will not hear tales of immortal punch lines when Super Bowl XLII is mentioned.

Sure, they will hear about the biggest upset in NFL history. They will see clips of Eli Manning’s game-winning drive every other weekday on ESPN Classic. But the ads will quickly fade from our memories and history books. In fact, Super Bowl XLII will be remembered much like the Patriots season — it was almost perfect.

Perhaps it’s the ridiculously expensive prices for ad space that caused this stumble. With so much money tied up in airtime alone (a record $2.7 million for 30 seconds), maybe cost cuts had to be made in the production budget.

So instead of paying the big bucks for the likes of Donny Deutsch, the big companies had to settle for the guys who handled Vern Fonk’s advertising campaign on local TV.

Last year, the cost of airtime was still a whopping $2.6 million, and that was the year of the incredible “Federline! Fries!” Nationwide Insurance ad. That tends to oust the cost theory and bring into question the talent of the ad agencies themselves.

Are they just getting lazy? Are they simply trying to exploit our rapidly decreasing attention spans by using loud noises and pretty colors to cheaply distract us, rather than attempt to invoke an insatiable desire to buy their product?

I chose to optimistically believe that Sunday was an unfortunate fluke, an aberration in the commercial legacy of the Super Bowl.

For the sake of future generations, let us hope that Bud Light has realized that a guy who gets sucked into a jet engine really isn’t that funny. Hopefully they will return next year with the extraordinary ads that made terms like “WAAASSSSSUP!?” a legend.

[Reach columnist Jeff Dickson at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]