BOSTON: In American presidential elections, you don't win the silver medal, you lose the gold.
For Boston, it was a day of Great Expectations. Would their man, John Kerry, become the 44th President of the United States or return to relative obscurity as the Junior Senator for Massachusetts?
The one outcome everyone was praying for was a clear result. In the lead-up to election day there was a constant crackle of news stories about legal challenges, and rows over voting in different parts of the country.
A high turnout would benefit Kerry and for that reason the Democrats were reported to be the fore in the drive for maximum voter registration.
Republicans, on the other hand, were more likely to have their lawyers looking askance at some of those seeking to vote.
High turnout, good weather: Kerry wins. Low turnout, bad weather: Bush remains President. This was the conventional wisdom.
There were also a couple of folk legends. Ever since 1936 the consistent pattern has been that, if the Washington Redskins football team win their last home game prior to the election, then the President gets a second term; if the Redskins lose, the challenger takes over the White House.
Last Sunday the Green Bay Packers hammered the Redskins: good news for Kerry, a bad omen for Bush.
But, to tell the truth, even a local boy becoming President was a relatively minor event in Bostonian eyes compared to the epic feat of their baseball heroes, the Boston Red Sox, who won the World Series for the first time since 1918.
Over three million people turned out at the weekend to applaud the Red Sox at a victory parade in Boston.
There was comfort for the Democratic candidate in the result, because at a low point during the campaign a critic sneered that: "Kerry will be President when the Red Sox win the World Series".
His local critics describe Kerry as an "outsider" in Boston politics. It's a rough-and-tumble world with a strong Irish-American working-class element, memorably captured in Edwin O'Connor's best-selling novel, The Last Hurrah.
The patrician Kerry, or so his detractors claim, doesn't quite fit into this glad-handing, beer-drinking milieu. Even journalists who are broadly on the same political wavelength say they find him aloof and, asked what kind of President Kerry would make, one media source responded: "One-term."
Be that as it may, Kerry has a largely-successful political record. After some early setbacks due to inexperience, he took over as number two in the Senate to the legendary Ted Kennedy in 1984 and has held his place there ever since.
Having been initially dismissed as a far-left product of the Vietnam generation, he has worked his way assiduously to the centre, so that even the cleverest Republican propagandists now have difficulty portraying him as anything other than a moderate.
Win or lose, few could fault the Kerry campaign. He had given the President a run for his money, and then some. Right up to the end, the polls showed them neck-and-neck. Kerry also has a formidable reputation as a good "closer" who puts on a late spurt to beat his opponents to the finish-line. Indeed, like some other politicians, Kerry generally seems to be at his best when the going gets tough. Such qualities would be needed if he turned out the be the American people's choice to lead them over the next four years.
Mr Kerry's Boston schedule yesterday began with casting his vote, followed by lunch at the Union Oyster House. Supporters were organising a rally at Boston's Copley Square and it was here, in the event of a clear result, that the candidate would make his final speech, acknowledging victory or accepting defeat.
Win or lose, America would never be quite the same again.