• Sarah Palin will utter the words/phrases “hockey mom,” “reform,” “old boys’ network” and “brave soldiers” within the first 10 minutes.

• Joe Biden will realize, soon after asking moderator Gwen Ifill what she’s been up to since “227″ went off the air, that he’s made a huge mistake.

• It will be really boring. Seriously.

I always forget how boring these things really are. But seriously…

First off, I was pleasantly surprised on the format. So much better than the standard “90-second response, 60-second rebuttal” than we’ve seen so much of in the past. Barack Obama was definitely cooler, but was he too cool? If you’d been watching with the sound off (as Sarah Palin does with “SNL”), you’d have thought John McCain was a bit deranged… the strangely Joker-esque smile that seemed to pop up every time Obama issued some sort of criticism.

On substance, Obama was doubtless the winner, if only because he kept steering McCain’s criticisms back to relevant facts. But he never had a real body-blow against McCain, at least not the kind that politicos like me get excited about. McCain is still throwing a lot of chips on the notion that voters really care about The Surge® (which definitely is/was a tactic, not a “strategy”), and I thought Obama’s relentless refocusing on Afghanistan showed him as a new kind of Democrat, one who’s not going to be bowled over on national security as Kerry and Gore before him.

McCain was much more on the attack; for almost every question, he seemed to have a prepared zinger about some thing that Obama “supported” or “opposed” — most of them distortions, especially that bit about “negotiating without preconditions” and whether Henry Kissenger favored such a thing or not. (He does… Sullivan quickly up with this.)

I’ve got to put together the newspaper now… but a few other notes: Olbermann notes McCain wore no flag pin! … Jim Lehrer is great, even if he does look like an owl … McCain still using old lines (“I don’t know if that was a criminal issue or a paternal issue”) … McCain implicitly admits what neither he nor many of his GOP colleagues ever has, which is that the U.S. has tortured people.