Before we go overboard analyzing the meaning of the narrow special-election victory of a Republican in a Republican district, we should remember how it came to be that a Democrat named Jon Ossoff managed to raise and spend more than $30 million in this House race — the most expensive such race in history by a very large margin — only to lose it.

Democrats enraged and emboldened by the Trump victory in November came out of the gate hard and fast against the incoming regime. They organized gigantic protests and rallies and succeeded in trumping Trump’s inaugural weekend with an awe-inspiring 3 million-person turnout nationwide for the so-called “women’s march.”

And when the president nominated Rep. Tom Price to be his secretary of health and human services, the table was set for an epic effort to show these stunning protests could have stunning real-world results.

Price, a congressman from Georgia, represented a largely affluent suburban district outside Atlanta that Trump had only won by 1.5 percentage points after Mitt Romney had taken it by 24 (and Price by 23.4). The district clearly had problems with Trump personally and that disaffection seemed like potentially fertile ground.

Democrats and liberals were frantic about doing something positive, something meaningful, something powerful after the November wound, and word whipped around the country that there was a winnable fight in a Georgia special election with a primary election on April 18.

No one quite anticipated the desperate enthusiasm that would follow as Ossoff entered the fray. The no-name Democrat who’d challenged Price in 2016 had raised and spent less than $1,000. The Daily Kos, the leftist website that pioneered grassroots internet political fundraising, generated $1 million for Ossoff in a matter of weeks.

Ossoff raised nearly $9 million by election day in April. No one had ever seen anything like it. The need was pressing; if Ossoff could get 50.001 percent of the vote that night, he’d immediately go to Congress as the district’s representative. If he fell short but still led, he’d face a June runoff.

In the end, he got 48.6 percent and the effort to hand Trump a defeat and serve as the vanguard of an anti-GOP wave had to be extended to June. His closest rival, Karen Handel, only got 20 percent.

And at this point, the fundraising accelerated. Over the next two months, Ossoff raised another $15 million. Ninety-eight percent of the money he raised came from outside the district. (So did Ossoff; he doesn’t live there and couldn’t even vote for himself.) The GOP money machine kicked in too, with outside spending on Handel’s behalf bashing Ossoff.

All that money, $55 million on a single House race, and it was the political equivalent of World War I trench warfare. It’s likely every penny after the original election was wasted, as Ossoff ended up a point lower than he was on April 18 while Handel scooped up every non-Ossoff vote and finished with a very comfortable margin.

There’s no question national Democratic enthusiasm is real. The issue going forward for them and for Republicans goes to sustainability. The disappointment that will follow the Ossoff result could depress that enthusiasm at exactly the wrong moment.

That $30 million could’ve funded six House races next year in which Democrats would’ve had a better shot than they did here. Democrats only need to flip 24 Republican seats to take majority control of the House — and there are 23 districts held by Republicans that Hillary Clinton actually won in 2016. The Ossoff district wasn’t one of them.

The Georgia results ought to be a warning shot for Democrats, not a battle cry. They have to be smarter. They have to spend their money more wisely. They have to win where they can, not where they hope to.

As for Republicans and Trump: They, too, need to be cold-eyed and ruthless about what last night meant. It wasn’t great news for them to win a district by a margin 19 points lower than the one in November 2016. Triumphalism would be short-sighted and foolish. This was no triumph. They dodged a bullet.