The midterms are over. Not officially, not everywhere — Arizona and California will still be counting when the rest of the country has moved on, because slow counting is what Arizona and California do — but over. The polls close, the ads stop, and the “most consequential election of our lifetime”, the one they sell us every two years, gets packed away until the next “most consequential election of our lifetime”.

Here is the part the coverage will skip: I don’t care who won. I never did. I wanted the thing done. In the morning, some people will be happy and some people will be sad, and it will be a story for a couple of days, and then it will be out of the system, which is where it belongs. A handful of races here in Arizona and out in California won’t be called for days yet, and between now and the announcements we won’t have to hear about the counting at all. That silence is not a problem with the system. That silence is the system working.

We did our part. Everybody who voted performed their due diligence, and that’s the whole of the citizen’s job — it ends at the ballot box. Now the media can do their part, which is to shut the hell up about it and move on. There are bigger stories in the world. There are bigger stories in this country. Affordability was supposedly a campaign issue — how about a few real stories about it, actual reporting, not one-minute segments wedged between the horse race and the weather? The issues were the excuse for the season. Cover them like they matter now that nobody’s selling anything.

Because that’s what the season was: selling. Wall-to-wall ads telling us the republic ends Tuesday if the wrong people win. A drumbeat of fear, on every channel, aimed at whichever side the channel sells to. It ended the way it always ends, with people voting and the republic declining to end, and the men and women who won will now go sit in their chairs in Washington — and some of them will do something with the next two years, and some of them will sit there and suck their thumbs, and in two years the drumbeat starts again.

Thank goodness it’s over. Goodbye, midterms. Take it off my plate, take it off everybody’s plate, and let’s go back to paying attention to things that are actually important