We New Yorkers were excited by the fact that for the first time in 24 years (on the Democratic side) or the first time ever (on the Republican side), our votes were going to make a difference in the nomination of a presidential candidate.

And did they ever. Bad exit polls suggested Bernie Sanders was giving Hillary Clinton a race, but in a matter of minutes, it was clear they were wrong. She just walloped him.

This means New York’s Democrats have brought the Bernie insurgency closer to its inevitable end.

Here in New York, reality bit the Bernie bandwagon. He may deliver endless lectures about how money is everything in politics, but he outspent her in New York by 2-to-1 and she still romped. So give a listen in old Brooklyn-speak: Sometimes, money means bupkis.

Meanwhile, the state’s Republicans just did something for Donald Trump no other state’s GOP electorate has done for him: It gave him an outright majority of the votes in the single largest primary victory any candidate has scored thus far.

It’s a glorious night for Trumpkins for the same reason it’s a sobering night for those of us who believe a Trump nomination would be disastrous for the party and the country.

For the first time in this race, Trump actually closed strongly and ended up significantly outperforming his poll average by about 7 points.

The next five contests over the next two weeks take place on fertile ground for Trump, and if his ability to gain ground persists, he is going to be aiming a dagger at the hearts of the so-called “#neverTrump” crowd.

Ted Cruz was never going to win New York or come remotely close. But he should have been able to do far better than a horrifying 15 percent.

John Kasich beat Cruz here. Now, Kasich may be a better fit for New York than the very conservative Texan — indeed, Kasich won in Manhattan — but that wouldn’t have happened if Cruz had come even remotely close to making the sale with Republicans who don’t want Trump to be the nominee.

And there are a lot of them here in New York.

Cruz is running a tight, disciplined campaign focused on maximizing his delegate count through mastery of the rules governing delegates at the state level. But he’s running a mediocre campaign when it comes to winning over masses of voters.

If he continues to lose to Trump with voters in state after state, as it appears he will from Connecticut to Maryland to Rhode Island to Pennsylvania, the melioristic notion many not-Trumpers have entertained that Cruz just needs to wait out the bad states until he can turn to more favorable terrain like Indiana and Nebraska and California may turn on them.

He (and Kasich) may succeed in denying Trump the 1,237 delegates needed to secure a first-ballot victory at the convention in Cleveland. But the idea Cruz can take the nomination away from Trump on the second ballot at the convention if the Texan ends this primary season with a string of defeats flies in the face of everything we know about politics and political psychology.

The more Cruz loses, the more he will look like a loser. He’d better start winning, or he won’t have a case to make, and those private assurances he has of support on the second ballot will remain private and will cease being assured.