The Bell Curve:

This isn’t the piece I wrote for this space. I figured if everyone was as tired as I was of this endless campaign then I should share my relief that it was over by exploring a totally unrelated idea, which I did. And then I turned on my TV early Tuesday afternoon, was immersed in it almost to midnight, discarded the piece I had written and joined the celebration.

In those six hours on Tuesday — starting with a tiny town in New Hampshire that sent the first message for President-elect Obama and ending in a lakeside park in Chicago, where 200,000 ecstatic and often tearful witnesses heard our new president reach out to them in spirit — I saw a country, badly in need of unity, reinvent itself.

It would be difficult to imagine how any American could have come away from that day without being touched in deep places that were being hardened by the divisive excesses of the campaign.

So Tuesday, many millions of Americans of every age, sex and skin color took it upon themselves to say “enough,” then stand in long lines to cast votes that put a stamp on their determination to create a truly participatory democracy.

So powerful were the events of those six hours that they pushed the campaign into shadows that finally disappeared altogether in the light of the new awareness of involvement and unity.

I’ve sweated out election returns and been moved by inspired acceptance speeches over eight decades, but I’ve never experienced an election night nor heard one that touched the depths of the American soul as this one did. Not even Franklin Roosevelt. Not even John Kennedy.

It built slowly and steadily during the day. The first hours were devoted to election returns starting with the eastern states and moving across the country.

The returns were interspersed with pictures of thousands of voters waiting patiently in lines that sometimes took three hours to cast their ballots — astonishing sights in a country where 50% election turnouts had become more the rule than the exception.

But on this Tuesday, the indifference turned to excitement and determination to have a part in the process. And the satisfaction of seeing it happen in vignettes across the country while watching the numbers was exhilarating. And astonishing.

By 6 p.m. the trend was clear, and a couple of hours later Sen. John McCain emerged from his home in Arizona to make his concession speech. His last one. And his best.