From Sunday’s New York Times:

Ten years ago this month, all eyes were on Florida as lawyers, election officials and campaign workers bickered over the hanging chads and dimpled ballots, the suits and countersuits, that would determine whether the next president would be Al Gore or George W. Bush. The Op-Ed editors asked some of the people at the center of the recount to share their reminiscences.

Not surprisingly, they didn’t ask me. But here you go anyway:

In early December, 2000, I was in New Orleans attending a Best Practices in Journalism Election Hangover conference, where all the news organizations that received BPJ grants for coverage of the 2000 races were supposed to review their efforts in light of the election results.

Except there weren’t any in the presidential contest.

I remember us shuttling from workout sessions to CNN in an attempt to keep up with the dizzy developments in the legal battle of Bush v. Gore.  And then the Florida Supreme Court said, in essence, that Gore had won. And then the U.S. Supreme Court said, we’ll be the judge of that.

And then I was on my way to Tallahassee to cover the denouement, strapped into a puddle-jumper that featured four – count ’em, four – takeoffs and landings. I arrived in Tallahassee with no press credentials, no business cards, and no cellphone.

Idiot.

Luckily, Florida’s Sunshine Law made the state capital an open field, so I could go wherever I wanted. No question it was exhilarating to parachute into the endgame of the biggest story in memory, although every journalist who’d already been there for a month with no family, no change of clothes, and no idea of when it would all end thought I was an asshole.

And then it ended.

I remember sitting in my hotel room watching news correspondents try to figure out on the fly what the U.S. Supreme Court had decided.  Which was, Paging president-elect George W. Bush.

Your punchline goes here.