This is the point where we start sinking into a dark hole, mulling whether she should have spent more time in Wisconsin. Then, of course, comes the question of whether Clinton lost because she was a woman. The answer is: sort of. Her gender was both a handicap and an enormous selling point. Would the Democrats have wanted Harry Clinton to be their nominee? (Just try to construct a Harry Clinton in your mind. I dare you.)

And — wait a minute, don’t get depressed. There’s another side: Even if her sex was a problem, it allowed her to transform the country more than many men who won the job. While losing, she made it normal for women to run for the most powerful office on the planet.

This is critical. Look at all the breakthroughs women have made in the last century, and you’ll notice how many of them involved just making their presence in some new place seem matter of fact. All that pain and struggle to win the right to vote, and what did it get us short term? Warren Harding. But long term, it created a world where the big gubernatorial election in Virginia was analyzed in terms of women in the suburbs and that knockout Senate race in Alabama was pretty much all about black women streaming to the polls.

Or take a more modest example. There was a time — not all that long ago — when television executives believed a woman could not be the solo anchor on the national evening news because our voices didn’t convey the proper sense of authority. Then in 2006, Katie Couric took over at CBS, to great hubbub and commentary. She did fine. Life moved on. In 2009 Diane Sawyer became the anchor at ABC. She did fine. There was barely a peep. The great triumph actually did not arrive until everybody found the whole matter boring.

Now, when people handicap the next Democratic presidential nomination, there are lots of women in the mix — Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand. (And, O.K., Oprah.) Whoever runs, the important thing is that primary debates will no longer resemble Shriner conventions. Women will be all over the place. Soon, they’ll be half the big decision-makers. It will be normal.

When Hillary Rodham Clinton graduated from law school and started her career, virtually the only women who had made it into the Senate were either honorary appointees for a brief symbolic term (the first, Rebecca Latimer Felton, got one day) or a senator’s widow. The exceptions proved the rule. The great Margaret Chase Smith came from the House, where she had succeeded her dead husband. Nancy Kassebaum happened to be the daughter of the Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon.

You get the idea. And there was Hillary. On the one hand, another political wife. On another, a marker for the entire country, driving home the fact that Congress was never going to be just a guy thing again. At times of despair I like to recall that when she was sworn into the Senate in 2001, my little niece watched the coverage intensely, and asked my sister whether it was possible for men to be senators, too.