Anyone who says they know what happens next in Alberta is kidding themselves. Even as their historic victory unfolded Tuesday night, top NDP officials seem hard-pressed to believe it, refusing to accept they’d won until the numbers were overwhelming. The best anyone can do is stand back and watch, and hope it works out well.

• The province that has been the driver of Canada’s economy is now in the hands of dozens of untested, inexperienced politicians who have never even had a seat in the legislature, much less run a government. As National Post’s Jen Gerson pointed out before the vote, the NDP candidate list included lots of students, a yoga instructor, a guy with the most spectacular beard in Alberta, and a huge fan of Hugo Chavez, the president-for-life who drove Venezuela’s oil-rich economy straight into the ground.

Historically, parties that come from nowhere to win big majorities don’t fare that well. Federally, John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney both struggled with neophyte caucuses that proved beyond their control. And the disaster that followed Bob Rae’s Ontario NDP victory was cited more than once during the campaign.

On the other hand, there is one outstanding example of a party coming from nowhere to seize power and hold it successfully: that would be the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party, which saw its 44-year run come crashing to an end Tuesday.

• You might as well stick a fork in the Keystone XL pipeline, it’s done. Premier-elect Notley says she won’t even lobby on its behalf. That should please Barack Obama, whose strategy of delay appears to have worked perfectly. By refusing to make a decision on the pipeline, the U.S. president had made clear it wasn’t going to happen on his watch anyway. At least now we can quit pretending.

•  One of the more intriguing aspects of the NDP victory may be its effect on celebrity environmental tourists. Condemning the oilsands has been great fun for high-profile activists flying in for a quick photo op and a shaken fist or two. But what happens when the “tar sands” are under the jurisdiction of pleasant, likeable, left-wing Premier Rachel Notley, who has declared no intention of shutting them down, but wants to squeeze more royalties out of them and improve environmental standards? Notley told the Edmonton Sun before the election she’s fed up with the coziness of the industry with the PC government:

”The trouble now is whenever a set of rules is introduced, everyone immediately runs to their favourite lobbyist, they all go behind closed doors and loopholes the size of 18-wheelers are then written into the process… If you do it fairly and everybody has good warning and knows the rules will be maintained, then it will happen.”

She also wants more upgrading to be done within the province, which is a lot easier said than done, as other jurisdictions have discovered.

• Notley is also not anti-pipeline, or says she isn’t. She professes to think kindly of the Energy East project that would send oil to the East Coast, and the Kinder Morgan pipeline to the B.C. coastline. That should prompt some interesting sessions with Ontario’s Premier Kathleen Wynne and Quebec’s Philippe Couillard, who have done a lot of grandstanding about Energy East to curry favour with the activist crowd. That bit of hypocrisy will be harder to sell now that the NDP is on the Alberta end of the project. Like so many others, Wynne and Couillard will have to adapt to an era in which Alberta is no longer easily held up as the bogeyman of Canadian confederation, easily bashed as a preserve of Big Oil and Big Tories.

• Amid all the jubilation on Tuesday, perhaps the saddest spectacle was former Wildrose leader Daneille Smith determinedly tweeting that it wasn’t her fault

It may be true that a united PC/Wildrose might have hindered the NDP juggernaut, but it’s also a fact that the cynical effort to pull it off by way of a backroom deal was a big factor in voters deciding they’d finally had enough of the entitled Tories.

Hmmm, yes: all those “progressives” who love to note that 60% of Canadians voted against Stephen Harper can now explain why Rachel Notley is the peoples’ choice when 60% of Albertans chose other parties.

• If the future of the province is uncertain, the future of the PC party is even more so. Jim Prentice didn’t even want to stick around to find out, quitting as leader and as an MLA, even though he won his seat. Alberta doesn’t change governments often, but once it does it’s merciless. No ousted government has ever been given a second chance. With the Tories in third spot, the logical choice would be for conservatives to migrate to Wildrose, making Alberta, like Saskatchewan, a province with lots of conservatives but no conservative party.