The fifth season just ended for the show that’s gotten more recognition than Zack Morris and Kelly Kapowski at a Bayside Tigers pep rally — the HBO series “Sex and the City.”

And many who are not blessed with HBO or friends with HBO, or who are plagued with being guys who just don’t get it, are still wondering what all the fuss is about.

The finale of the eight-episode season, shortened due to the fast-approaching due date of pregnant star Sarah Jessica Parker, ended with a bang and featured a cameo by Parker’s husband Matthew Broderick’s Broadway co-star Nathan Lane.

Like Kapowski, though, who still won Homecoming queen with a maroon face thanks to Screech’s not-so-miracle zit cream, “Sex and the City” still won the support of its viewers — mainly college girls, our moms and any women in between — despite a season blemished with laments and lost loves.

While the season brought us guest-starring roles by some very college-friendly comedians such as Ron Livingston (“Office Space”), Anne Meara (“Zoolander”), Molly Shannon (“Saturday Night Live”) and Amy Sedaris (“Strangers With Candy”), the ever-growing hype is really what kept the show going all season. With some sort of depression or regret centered on Miranda’s new baby, Charlotte’s separation, Samantha’s break up with her horny hotel-mogul boyfriend and Carrie’s overall hopelessness about her book, her boys and her Mr. Big lacing just about every show, the season was a bit of a downer.

However, we all still watched it. And I didn’t really even know why until I tried to write about it.

Racking my brain and trying to figure out exactly what made so many girls obsessed with the show, I thought maybe it was because we all secretly want to be just like those four wild women. Every day, I see the aviator sunglasses coupled with poofy skirts (a làCarrie), girls walking into the White Horse and ordering cosmos (not knowing at all that they taste like ass, but just knowing they’ll match their outfit) and groups of friends sitting outside Espresso Royale trying to decide who is the respective Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda of the clan.

For a couple of consecutive evenings, I sat in front of my laptop in a very Carrie Bradshaw-like position — I was trying to write an article for the paper. However, instead of an orange mocha frappuccino (or some other random exotic Starbucks drink) and a cigarette, I was enjoying a Diet Coke and a stick of Winterfresh. Instead of trying to write a racy sex column for the New York Star, I was trying to create an insightful article about a show about a racy sex column for a college newspaper.

And, possibly most importantly, instead of the lights and excitement of New York City and its hot spots of the moment happening stories below me, I was staring out my window onto the recent victim of construction (Spring Street), sitting just a half flight of stairs below me and echoing with choruses of “Where are we? How do we get back to Sellery? I heard the keg’s tapped at this party.”

With all the commotion about the show, its fashion, its attitude and its, well, sex, I wondered to myself — Can we really pull off this “Sex and the City” lifestyle without the city??

Of course not. Sure, Madison has its fair share of New Yorkers, but it’s also got its fair share of Minnetonka-, Mukwonago- and Muskego-born kids running around — and in this environment, the Jimmy Choo shoes and $200 dinners at Moomba really don’t belong.

Not to mention the fact that when you hook up with someone, there aren’t eight million other people to occupy you to avoid a second encounter; with an average of about two degrees of separation between you and anyone else on this campus, you’re bound to see him/her again. Soon.

But what is prevalent in our world as well as the glorified one on the show is the annoyance of single life, the annoyance of the happy couples, the annoyance of work and the support of friends you can really talk to.

“Even though it’s supposedly taboo to talk about all the stuff they talk about on the show, people actually do it,” a friend of mine claimed when trying to explain to me exactly why everyone likes it. “We sit around with our best friends and talk about our lives and our problems, and a lot of times they’re the same as the ones on the show,” she continued.

Of course, critics complain the frivolity of the women’s conversations on the show make them seem like promiscuous college kids. So?we ARE promiscuous college kids. We party, we hook up, we try our luck and we talk about it. With our best friends.

So last night, avoiding a night of trying our luck with all the crap of being single in a (small) city, my roommates and I went and ate fatty food and pretended to get some work done. We weren’t at some cute little trendy diner. We were at Perkins.

But the conversation was the same — our lives, our loves, our laments. Unfortunately, we had me — the Charlotte, Niki — the Carrie and Katy — the Samantha, but no Miranda.

But our fourth roomie didn’t get knocked up. He’s a guy.

And he doesn’t get it.