THOSE Britney Spears Super Bowl ads turned out to be the most-often replayed part of the Cinderella football game.

It didn’t matter that this year’s contest was one of the closest games in Super Bowl history – decided on the last play of the game – says TiVo, the leading maker of digital video recorders.

The company monitored the viewing choices of 10,000 of its 280,000 subscribers, it said yesterday, and found that most people wanted to see the Britney ads for Pepsi.

As it turns out, Sunday may be the last time viewers will be able to see some of those Britney ads, in which she was shown in several different decades – the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and 2002.

Pepsi says only three of the Britney ads which debuted during the Super Bowl will be kept on the air.

Fans couldn’t get enough of Britney in black and white and breathless, but found the hard-edge Robert Palmer knockoff routine simply resisitible.

It was the first ad – showing the pop singer spoofing on the style of Pepsi ads dating back to the ’50s – that was the most popular.

In all, the soft-drink company paid about $8 million to air the four ads during the Super Bowl – and a reported $4 million more to produce them.

When the ads were tested, the ’80s segment scored poorly with audiences and has been banished to cable.

In the circa-’80s ad, Spears is dressed in a man’s suit, flanked by a bevy of shimmying models with slicked-down hair and is singing Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible” – a 1988 hit that was later turned into a Pepsi commercial.

“You may see the [’80s] spot sporadically on cable ,” Pepsi rep Dave DeCecco said. “But that’s a pretty big buy [meaning 30 seconds of air time] to be running in prime time,” he said.

Three other spots have been cut to 30 seconds and feature extra footage not included in the Super Bowl ads, DeCecco said.

During the Super Bowl, Pepsi asked viewers to vote on the Internet for their favorite ad.

The malt-shop ad – supposed to be reminiscent of the ’50s – won the poll.

Commercials have become some of the most talked-about part of the Super Bowl.

Last year, Nielsen reported that viewing was actually higher for the ads than for the game itself – an unheard-of phenomenon.

The survey by TiVo seems to back that up.

TiVo is a video recording device that is hooked to a computer hard drive – making it possible to replay parts of a TV show while it is being recorded.

Because TiVo is also hooked to the phone lines, it is possble for the company to anonymously monitor subscribers’ viewing habits.