"Enough about the candidates, what about the staffers?

The hardest, longest, closest primary in history is over, and the losers are supposed to get over it and become Obamaniacs?

Try to tally the sheer will, sacrifice and devotion by the numbers: 16 months of sleep deprivation, 480 nights not in your own bed, 50 states (plus a bunch of those confusing territories), 960,000 calories of road food, 4.8 million PDA thumb strokes, more than enough tears (joy, grief), many memorable meltdowns, 17 1/2 hangovers and a scattered handful of hours of perfect righteous euphoria -- for what?

When Hillary Clinton suspended her crusade Saturday with one soaring speech, some of her staffers looked unmoored in the National Building Museum's Great Hall, spent and melancholy. Behind their practiced smiles, they were grieving a future that had once appeared so alive and real. California won, and Texas, too, and Ohio and Pennsylvania and . . . what if? If only . . .

"Please don't go there," Clinton said, reading their thoughts.

For what? Well, for 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling, Clinton reminded them. But that's not a win.

Losing a primary is like little else in human striving. Death, at least, offers finality. A general election loss affords the cheap solace of permanent contempt for the victor from the other party. Reach back to still-raw agonies of defeat from youth: Even after the last heartbreaking loss in the soccer tournament, all you had to do was shake hands on the field, then resume cursing tearfully. You didn't have to smile, change uniforms and play for the other team.

After a primary, if you want to put your party in the White House, you are expected to suck it up and start making cold calls for the guy who knocked your gang out of the ring. And here's your boss, with her last working order coming at you in the form of a chipper exhortation on the Clinton campaign Web site:

"Thank you! Support Senator Obama today. Sign up now and together we can write the next chapter in America's story."

Getting over it takes more will, character and time. A faith in the bigger Democratic picture.

"You get over it because you have to get over it," says Paul Begala, the consultant who worked for Bill Clinton and who says he was "one thousand percent for Hillary."

Begala says the only thing in the human condition akin to a tough primary is a family fight. He quotes an uncle who used to say, "God gave us families so we wouldn't fight with strangers."

Family fights tend to be more emotional than other kinds of fights, yet afterward you're supposed to sit down for Thanksgiving dinner and smile for the picture.

"Think about what unites a family," Begala says. "Some external threat. Democrats have that in John McCain and George Bush."

Primaries are internal threats. Temperatures rise. Imagery gets colorful. "What I have to do is make sure that my anger with a guy like [Mitt] Romney, whose teeth I want to knock out, doesn't get in the way of my thought process," veteran consultant Ed Rollins said several months ago when he was national campaign chairman for Mike Huckabee.

Now, looking back, Rollins says the GOP primary battle turned out to feel more like a NASCAR race, fast and full of jockeying, with McCain sneaking up from behind to win without too many lingering hard feelings.

"Sometimes it's hard for staff to heal the wounds," Rollins says. "They worked very hard, very intense, with a lot at stake. Hillary's people have been going hard for a long time. . . . The good news for everyone is there's some time" until the general election.

"Time heals all wounds, and it does in politics, too," says David "Mudcat" Saunders, a senior strategist on John Edwards's campaign. "I was upset for maybe two weeks. But I got over it. Because you have to."

Not that it's easy. Back in late January, right after Edwards dropped out of the race, Saunders told The Post: "I'm going to get home and get under my bed and get in a fetal position and suck my thumb with my gun, and then get back out there."

He was glad Edwards decided to endorse Obama. But in recent weeks he found himself softening toward Clinton -- whom he had openly disdained earlier -- upon seeing how she reached out to rural America. Time was working its magic on ol' Mudcat.

But here's a surprise, from his experience on other campaigns: "It's a hell of a lot easier to be the loser and deal with it than to be the winner and deal with it."

How do you figure?

Before getting over it, the loser's supporters will need to vent. "You've got to sit there and listen to it," Saunders says. "You're sitting there and they're besmirching your candidate, and their candidate already lost! . . . You've got to let them vent and raise hell. Don't engage them, don't argue over who's the best nominee."

By the unwritten rules of this strange post-primary interlude, the winner's supporters may not air their own grievances over how the contest went down. They must be gracious.

Like this: "I can't say enough about how well Obama and his senior leadership have handled this," Begala says. "If anybody had the right to do a victory dance in the end zone, they came from nowhere to beat the best brand in Democratic politics."

And this: After Dick Gephardt dropped out of the 2004 presidential primary race, his senior aide Steve Elmendorf got over it and jumped to John Kerry's campaign. He noticed some staffers wearing buttons boasting they had been with Kerry "before Iowa" -- a subtle dig at transplants from any unsuccessful competitor's camp. Kerry "saw someone wearing one of those buttons," Elmendorf says. "He said, 'Take that off. I don't want to see anybody on this campaign wearing that button again. This is not about who was for me before Iowa, this is about who is for me now, this is about who is going to help me get elected president.' "

"At the end of the day, you've got to get the whole team together if you want to be elected president," Elmendorf says. "You don't have the luxury of cutting the other team out."

Practice helps. "You do feel a personal feeling about Senator Clinton as a person, as a human being," says former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, a key Clinton surrogate on the campaign trail. "You know what she's going through . . . how much time, energy and passion have been poured into an effort like this. You don't want to appear disloyal."

But Vilsack is proof you can get over it. He says he is "pulling for Obama" and will do whatever he can to help. And don't forget: Technically, Obama is the third candidate Vilsack has supported this campaign season. He backed Clinton only after ending his own bid for the nomination in early 2007. He's gotten over it twice.

Phil Singer, Clinton's ferocious deputy communications director, this week sounded like he still has some issues. He lost no time setting up his own consulting firm. At a symposium hosted by the National Journal and Google, he could be seen channeling his disappointment against a handy target that would not undermine post-primary unity: the Drudge Report, which, Singer said, " 'bastardized' the media," according to a report on the Huffington Post.

Meanwhile, Clinton and Obama staffers say they have friends in the other camp and have been exchanging BlackBerry'd equivalents of postgame handshakes on the sandlot.

"We're all in touch by e-mail, phone and in person," Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee says by e-mail. "The conversations are friendly and supportive. . . . Some of my closest friends have been working for Senator Obama -- we were friends before the campaign, and we're friends now that the primaries are over."

"We're confident that people at all levels are going to come together," says Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan.

Sevugan knows how to get over it. He was communications director for Chris Dodd's primary bid. After Dodd dropped out and endorsed Obama, Sevugan migrated, too. He sent an e-mail to his media contacts. The subject line said, "Obama is already helping the economy . . ." and the text said ". . . by giving me a job."" (David Montgomery, The Washington Post, June 13, 2008)