As Don Meredith used to sing as the clock wound down in Monday night football games, “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.’’ The annual buzzfest over the epic commercials that debut during the Super Bowl is about to come to an end, because there aren’t any new commercials that debut during the Super Bowl.

More than half of the 70-odd ads that aired during Sunday night’s Super Bowl telecast had been circulating on the Internet for days or even weeks. At $3.5 million a pop for a 30-second commericial, advertisers want to leverage every eyeball they can -- and they’ve discovered the way to do that is to preview the ads on-line.

Honda’s CR-V ad with Matthew Broderick reviving his Ferris Bueller’s Day Off character, goofing off from work instead of school? It had already been seen more than 10 million times before game time. No hyperbole — literally, 10 million mouse-clicks on American computers. The VW-chasing dog? More than two million.

The Teleflora ad promising that your girlfriend will turn into a hypersexual supermodel if you just send her some flowers? Seen it. The college kid who thinks he’s just gotten a Chevy convertible for graduation but really it’s a mini-fridge? The Toyota Camry ad featuring a couch made of lingerie models, a poopless baby and a crime-fighting plant? The polar bears fumbling a Coke bottle like a pack of furry Dolphins wide receivers? Seen ’em all.

The ad leakage to the Internet was so profound that the website SuperBowlAdsForGeeks.com actually ran a list of ads that weren’t released on-line before airing. (The site’s name is no exaggeration; it also posted a list of frequently asked questions that started off: Q. What is the Super Bowl? A. A professional football championship game.)

Some advertisers got amazing mileage by releasing commercials that they merely pretended were for the Super Bowl. The pro-gun-control group Mayor Against Illegal Guns not only got its ad — a chat between Michael Bloomberg and Thomas Menino, the mayors of New York and Boston, about the evils of guns — posted on dozens of websites but run in its entirety for free on both NBC and MSNBC news shows. Actually, the group didn’t try to buy time on the NBC telecast of the game, but merely sold it to a few local markets at a fraction of the cost, but wound up with millions of dollars in free publicity.

A related scam — deliberately making ads so outrageous that they’re guaranteed to be rejected by network censors, then trumpeting them as “banned by the Super Bowl,’’ seemed to decline this year. In 2011, a bunch of companies — led by Ashley Madison, a dating service for cheaters, and the fairly self-explanatory website GodHatesObama.com — played the-ad-they-don’t-want-you-to-see game. This year, there was only one: TheBigandtheBeautiful.com, a dating website for the jumbo-sized, rejected after it included a shot of a barely-thonged butt in its ad.

There were some exceptions to the new on-line-first rule. The Chrysler ad with Clint Eastwood, in his best Dirty Harry voice, suggesting that it’s downright un-American to buy a car anywhere but Detroit made its debut during the game, possibly because on repeat viewings it’s going to look silly. So did a candy ad featuring the most nudity since Janet Jackson’s nipple ran amok in 2004. In this case, however, the wardrobe failure was suffered by an M&M, so the FCC fines are expected to be light.

There were a few other ads that pushed the television envelope, though in some cases their salaciousness was generally obsured by their inscrutability. I am still trying to figure out what a young boy peeing in a swimming pool has to do with with Taxact.com’s income-tax software. Others were less opaque, particularly a H&M underwear ad with soccer star David Beckham strutting and stretching in his tighty whiteys in a way that gave a whole new meaning to “bend it like Beckham.’’

Sex is hardly new to advertising, but the weirdness running through many of this year’s commercials was. Doritos seemed to think it could sell more chips with one ad in which a dog murders the household cat and buries it in the backyard, another in which a baby is used as as slingshot. (OK, I laughed a bit at that one, when no one was looking, but I’m still sticking with Fritos.) Then there was the Audi ad, in which the company bragged that its headlights are strong enough to kill vampires. Perhaps that’s a strong sellling point in Transylvania and I’ve just underestimated this globalism stuff.

Vampire-killing headlights seemed pretty puny next to the claims in a Chevy ad that claimed its Silverado is the only truck that outlast the end of the world. The ad ends with a small group of survivors looking downcast as they remember a friend who didn’t make it: “Dan drove a Ford.” When the ad debuted on the Internet a few days ago, Ford protested — I swear to you, I am not making this up — that tests show its trucks would survive the end of the world even better. I myself am waiting to hear from the Consumer Reports Independent End-of-the-World Testing Lab before making a decision on a new truck. Hopefully the vampires will not get me first.