Now that Elizabeth Warren has bowed to the inevitable, the Biden-Bernie matchup is either a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party…or the typical dust-settling of a conventional race.

That is, one establishment candidate, a veteran, battle-scarred establishment type who is not terribly exciting, and an insurgent candidate, a colorful, more ideological provocateur who makes followers swoon.

In this view, the voters who gave Joe Biden 10 Super Tuesday victories were simply coming home after flirting with two dozen potential dates. Biden was the safe, dependable choice for those whose main goal is beating President Trump—and that includes some who feel more affinity with Bernie Sanders.

Usually, this plays out over a couple of months, and the race is hardly over. But in the space of four days, Biden transformed his fortunes and, in what had seemed unthinkable, passed Sanders in the delegate count. It didn’t hurt that Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg closed ranks behind him, followed by Mike Bloomberg, or that he was lifted aloft by his first sustained burst of positive press. But the breadth of his coalition—African-Americans, working classes, suburban dwellers and older voters—suggests he was always a likely front-runner once folks were convinced he could win.

It was, as John Harris puts it in Politico, “a signal that not all the old ways of thinking about national politics are defunct in an age of disruption.”

The 2008 contest was the exception, with newcomer Obama toppling semi-incumbent Hillary. But Harris recites the history: “Jimmy Carter in 1980, Walter Mondale in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1992, John Kerry in 2004, Hillary Clinton in 2016—the party has ultimately coalesced over the more consensus-oriented politician in the spring after a flirtation with more flamboyant or purely ideological insurgents.”

And that means Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Howard Dean, Bill Bradley—and Bernie last time—didn’t win.