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No post-election news conference by the premier (cancelled). No ritual public appearances by the other major party leaders (rain checks).

So what happened to the usual triumphal talk from bleary-eyed politicians who always put on their best post-game face? They all lost face, each in their own way, by losing one too many seats.

So they all stayed out of sight, tending to their wounds — or wounded pride.

• Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford took a pass on his planned victory lap because he felt deflated. True, he won re-election as premier with his third consecutive majority, but his 80-seat tally compared unfavourably to the 83 he won in 2022, and fell far short of his fantasy of 90 to 100 ridings.

Ford had appealed for the mother of all mandates to empower him in an imagined showdown with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, but Ontario’s voters didn’t deliver on that dream. The premier had long sought an audience with the president personally, but on a mid-campaign visit to the White House he was fobbed off on mid-level staff (who admonished him to heed Trump’s views on Canada as the 51st state).

Now, post-election, Ford is stuck with a more-of-the-same mandate that won’t get him any closer to the Oval Office. Just as well, given how Trump treated a visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday when he sought respect for his own country’s sovereignty.

There will be cringing and recriminating within the PC party over an election that changed nothing — neither the seat count nor the tariff threat. Ultimately it will matter little that they didn’t get the pretend mandate they wanted, because it was always make-believe.

Even if it felt like a bittersweet victory, vindication was Ford’s all the same: Despite losing three seats, he is sitting pretty today, whereas if he’d abided by Ontario’s fixed election law and waited until the scheduled June 2026 vote, he’d surely have lost more.

• NDP Leader Marit Stiles also kept a low profile Friday, resisting the ritual of spinning her party’s undeniable decline in popular support. Like Ford, she lost a few seats; unlike Ford’s Tories, the NDP lost a whopping five percentage points in the popular vote, tumbling to 18.55 per cent. Meanwhile, the Liberals gained six percentage points, soaring to 29.95 per cent.

That’s a spread of 11 percentage points, which is a bleak trend line for the NDP. Yet that’s not the fault of Stiles, who inherited a party that had nowhere to go but down and ran a disciplined, dignified campaign.

To be sure, NDP diehards can pat each other on the back for making the most of a losing hand. Despite the precipitous fall in voter support, they minimized their seat loss thanks to the fortuitous concentration of party support in core NDP ridings that remained loyal.

The NDP wound up with a wildly disproportionate 27 seats versus 14 for the rebounding Liberals. Proof, perhaps, that progressive politics in Ontario is more tribal and geographical than ideological, given the vanity of small differences between the opposition parties.

Yet after serving as the official opposition for the last seven years, the NDP had no excuse to lose — and lose seats. Increasingly, it is looking like a boutique party that is a boon to Ford’s Tories, splitting the progressive vote in swing ridings yet unable to act like a government in waiting because it keeps hitting an electoral ceiling.

That said, even if she is not destined to be Ontario’s next premier — and will only be opposition leader by default, not de facto — Stiles is adept at the difficult job of being NDP leader, where Job One is keeping a raucous and fractious caucus in line.

• Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie was also lying low Friday after losing the Mississauga East—Cooksville riding she’d contested — and failing to win more seats province-wide than the NDP despite gaining about 570,000 votes. (Roughly 60 per cent more ballots were cast for the Liberals than the NDP across Ontario).

If the Liberals had broken past the psychologically (and electorally) significant barrier of 30 per cent, many more close races might have gone their way. If the rival New Democrats and Greens had not siphoned away progressive votes in many ridings — including Crombie’s — her party might have performed better.

But the Liberals didn’t. The failure to win any seats in Mississauga proved a major embarrassment for a former local mayor who was “hired� for the job of Liberal leader on the premise — and boast — that she could deliver her home base and power base.

That said, it’s hard to imagine any of Crombie’s rivals in the 2023 leadership race performing any better in Mississauga or doing much better against Ford province-wide. Which is why Crombie will likely be able to stay on as leader for as long as she wants, at least until Liberals get the lay of the land.

Politicians like to say that campaigns matter in determining the victor and the vanquished in any election. To be sure, Ford’s Tories were always destined to win this one — it’s just that no one could foresee how much each leader would lose along the way.

Which is why they all stayed away Friday.