I initially sat down to write a post about how ABC is offering 815 (of course) fans the opportunity for a sneak peek at the Lost season premiere. But what I ended up with was something much more: A realization that no network has ever done as brilliant a job marketing one of its shows as ABC has done with Lost.

One could argue that the marketing of Lost has been the first to fully take advantage of all the tools available to keep fans interested and amped up in the off-season.

We had the Missing Pieces webisodes, which were devoured by fans, even as they disparaged them. The Hanso Foundation commercials and website, which had people calling 800 numbers and furiously trying to figure out where everything all fit in.

Remember the Oceanic Air website where you could click on a seating chart and occasionally get glimpses into who sat where and other tidbits?

Lost University accompanies the Season 5 Blu-Ray.

And, all along, there’s been full recognition that fan blogs were important to keeping the buzz going and ABC’s brought those bloggers to Hawaii for full-access trips.

Now, ABC has offered fans the chance to be among 815 who will get an advance peek at the Season 6 (otherwise known as the Last Season) premiere. There’s a short quiz to enter and I got five of the six answers right without blinking. I was allowed to change the final answer – heck, I couldn’t enter unless I had all six right, it waited until you got all six before giving you a “submit” button.

ABC rewards fans for knowing the minutae. They never came down on all the sites that used screen shots of the show to point out Easter eggs or even just illustrate blog posts. They knew that by letting fans use the show as they wanted, the fans would keep coming back.

And the powers that be may be even more brilliant than we realize, because there are all these connections now being drawn between Flash Forward and Lost that actually have my head spinning. Read this post from io9 and see if you don’t feel the same. As the post points out, even if it is just marketing, it’s brilliant marketing.

Until we canceled our cable service and, with it, our DVR, I watched most shows time-shifted. Lost and 24 were the only ones I didn’t, and the latter it was because I live-blog it. Lost is true water-cooler television. In my old office, a group of us would set aside a shared lunchtime every week to discuss the show the day after it aired. We had discussions almost from the moment more than one of us was in the office. Even this past season, we e-mailed the next day to ask questions of each other.

Lost and Battlestar Galactica were the only shows I didn’t watch with my laptop in front of me, dividing my attention from what was on screen. They were too complex and “important,” if one can say that about a television show.

Because ABC got the viewers to emotionally buy in so deeply, they were guaranteed an audience each week in a way that only live sporting events really are. The people who watched were likely to re-watch, even, though the rewatch usually would skip the commercials. But if people were sitting down to watch it, they were likely seeing at least some of what the advertisers had paid dearly for.

There will always be watercooler television, I think, because some people will want to watch a show the minute it’s released online. And there’s something to that shared moment.

The moment when millions of people sat in front of their television sets, cursing their cable provider until they realized that really WAS the end of The Sopranos. The moment the last helicopter took off from the 4077th, bringing down the curtain on M*A*S*H.

The moment millions realized Jack’s flashback was actually a flash forward and our brains exploded. And then we cursed because we realized we needed to wait another nine months to get our next full fix of Lost.

For better or worse, ours is a television culture. Sure, maybe a lot of people are watching it online. Maybe the audience is more segmented than ever before. But you can’t tell me there’s not something a little bit soothing knowing that there are millions of other people experiencing the same moment you are and are just as angered, heartened, saddened or baffled as you are.

We have another month before Lost comes back for its final season, on Feb. 2.

I’m not sure what’s going to take its place, but whatever it is, the network carrying it had better understand that the more they allow the audience to connect when it’s not on, the more the audience will want to connect when it is on.