Mike Hosking's reaction on Seven Sharp to the election result says more than he ever could.

OPINION: This morning, screengrabs littered the internet like, well, litter alongside a motorway verge. While Mike Hosking conducted himself through an hour-long Seven Sharp special like the professional he was, his face gave him away. Mike's Sad Resting Face was a thing, and the loony left echo chamber of Twitter was feasting upon it.

Even the chief executive of Potatoes New Zealand (and there's an unexpected learning right there, a trade union representing the rights of the humble spud, what a thing) revealed he had a chip on his shoulder, declaring "​Mike Hosking's bitter and petulant performance tonite means he must go".

The documentary maker Bryan Bruce, whose work is as diametrically opposed to Hosking's as Mike's clothing taste is to tasteful, discovered Facebook oil like a Taranaki well-driller when he gained 2,400 likes for his own mocking Hosk screengrab. His next post about neoliberalism and yada yada only got 300-odd.

Someone had even reportedly edited Mike's Wikipedia page to suggest he "cried like a baby" at the result, although all trace of that was swiftly gone.

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For those who didn't like Mike, then the whole is-Mike-biased debate was conclusively proved right there, right then, purely because he wasn't feeling very smiley. But apart from a somewhat unfair complaint that a whole 25 minutes after Winston began his speech we didn't have the entire make up of cabinet, a policy platform and 27 laws passed yet, what I saw of Seven Sharp he seemed to do his job.

But then of course, the next morning, we got other Mike - the still-not-a-journalist, but-not-a-debate-moderator-now Mike popping up to do his Mike's Minute.

Mike's choice of outfit for this regular online piece-to-camera was potentially indicative.

The traditional blazer-over-the-T-shirt look loved by those familiar with Mike's Minute remained, thank God.

But it was a very sombre black T shirt, and the blazer pattern was far less harsh on the eye than usual. Was it drawing too long a bow to suggest the hair product was less carefully applied than we've come to expect? Even longer to note a normally bustling newsroom behind him was virtually deserted, tactfully leaving Mike alone with his misery?

Anyway, the video's tagline told it all: 'There may be trouble ahead'. The Greens had been big losers, said Mike, it might turn out Labour had too, and it might even be that National hadn't lost at all.

What seemed certain to Hoskingologists was that Mike had decided he was a loser in all this.

The 'Happy Days' sign off we all know and love was absent.

This wasn't a happy day. But then the face had told us that.