Remember those days (an epoch ago) when states believed they must push forward their primaries and caucuses to Super Tuesday to avoid losing influence and being ignored? Oh, was that distant and quaint notion really still given credence only two days ago?

Yes, indeed, it was. The recently prevailing wisdom was that states should not allow themselves to be left behind; if they made their choices deep into February or even later they were disenfranchising themselves.

It doesn’t look that way now. Super Tuesday confirmed Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) as the clear front-runner for the Republican nomination, although former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and even the day’s main loser, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, won a handful of states each.

But the Democratic picture is no clearer now than it was on Monday. The two candidates who entered Super Tuesday tied as front-runners ended the day … tied as front-runners. In other words, the 24 states that piled together to be decisive in nominating the presidential candidates actually decided nothing.

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) have a similar number of delegates and roughly equal chances of becoming the Democratic nominee. There are plausible arguments from both sides as to why their candidate is the probable nominee, but the fact that they are both plausible underlines the central fact that they are roughly even.

Thus the real winners of Tuesday night were the states that decided not to rush their contests forward and now stand to gain importance and financial rewards.

Many of the smaller states that piled into Super Tuesday must now be thinking they could use some of the millions in campaign cash that will be poured into the economies of less hasty states. With the deep-pocketed Democrats running neck-and-neck and the party’s proportional delegate system making every vote count, it is likely that Obama and Clinton will empty their coffers into backwaters not previously known for controlling the nomination.

Where are all eyes now? Not on Tennessee, for example, which joined the Super Tuesday gang. The burghers of that state must surely be scratching their heads today and wondering why they didn’t stick to March, when they used to hold their primary.

No, all eyes are now on states such as Maine, which will hold its primary this Saturday, and on Virginia and Maryland (Feb. 12) and Nebraska (Feb. 13). Their importance will be magnified and will turn out to be far greater than that of small states that jumped on the Feb. 5 bandwagon.

It is easy to sympathize with states that didn’t want to let Iowa and New Hampshire choose for the nation. But the way things have panned out, we suspect the 2008 calendar will not be the template for the primaries in four years’ time.