Amidst the blizzard of day-after election coverage was a New York Times piece offering advice to "political junkies" suffering from the letdown ("withdrawal") from the frenzied campaign.

They quoted from one political blog: "After Nov. 4, psychologists predict, there will be legions of people all across America who will find a hole in their lives and time on their hands."

Maybe this is so, if you define the cessation of being hit over the head with a board as a hole in your life. Some of us, regardless of how we voted, are feeling nothing but relief.

The campaign's end spells, if not the promise, at least the hope of the resumption of governance. It can't get here too soon.

Naturally, we need to temper our expectations. President-elect Obama himself advised as much with a warning that "we may not get there in one year, or even one term" – "there" meaning the conquest of the staggering list of crises, chronic and acute, that the nation faces.

But there's a desire, a desperation even, for somebody to man a shovel and get to work. People vote for many reasons – ideology, civic franchise, the desire to affect history. Some of us are just ready for somebody to start making good on all that talk.

This has been a costly campaign, not just in terms of money, but of time. An awful lot has gone awry since the onset of the routine deferral of action until "after the election."

Consider that when this train left the station, we were all anticipating Clinton vs. Romney, and the top issues were immigration and Iraq. Maybe more than during any campaign season in memory, there has been a lot of change already.

The most sobering moment of the campaign came, in fact, just last month, and it didn't relate directly to any of the principals.

It was when former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan perched stiffly on the congressional hot seat and conceded his surprise at learning that a hog will, after all, eat itself to death.

You don't say.

On the sunny side, it hasn't been an unduly nasty election. Both Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, and their running mates, ran reasonably decent campaigns, at least until the gritty final days. During the debates, they were reasoned and collegial.

They could afford to be. If past elections have given rise to the so-called "pundit class," this one underscored the tireless spite and head-splitting cacophony of the Heckler Class.

They're the often-anonymous bloggers, comment posters, forwarders of crazy Internet rumors who stoked nut-job fires about Mr. Obama's middle name and Mr. McCain's abilities as a wartime pilot. Candidates don't have to contract for dirty tricks any more – amateurs do them for free.

It's a corny pipe dream, but imagine if the tone for the next few years had been set Tuesday night, in the campaigns' closing minutes.

When the president-elect said: "Let's resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long."

When his defeated opponent said: "I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in … offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences[.]"

Call me a daydreamin' fool. But what if it really came true?