Give it up to give it away to get it back

I wonder how it would feel if, say, you'd spent quite a while working on a brief, come up with an idea, for which you'd shown the creative director, as source material, a variety of zoomquilts online and, because he was someone you liked personally and whose work you respected, glowed with pathetic pride when he'd said, 'I think it's a great idea' and then had the idea passed to the client only for them to decide arbitrarily that they didn't want to advertise that particular product, and so you'd seethed with disappointment but eventually let the whole thing go and not ended up working for that agency and sort of moved on with your life, only to notice, just over a year later, an online zoomquilt-style moving POV idea reappear for a different model of TV from the same client under the same creative director amid a flurry of publicity having won arguably the biggest award in advertising?

Now I don't know, but I'd say if that happened, hypothetically, your only option would be just to congratulate the team involved and concede that it's not like you invented zoomquilts or POV advertising or anything, that you were only, at best, if at all, a facilitator in an extremely long chain, and acknowledge that the whole clown bankjob thing really added something that definitely was not present in any of the early iterations of the idea, and to just bear in mind that there is a kind of karma at work in this stuff, and nothing bums your karma harder than sour grapes particularly when given a public airing on a blog. For instance.