WASHINGTON -- WHILE NINE supposedly big-shot judges were giving new meaning to the word ''punt,'' it took an ordinary trial judge in Tallahassee to show the country what doing your duty squarely and definitively looks like.
As a result, in the forthright words of a top Al Gore adviser last night, the first real outline of what the word ''finality'' might mean is apparent.
It is, the adviser said, more an outline of legal finality than political finality, but where the US Supreme Court blinked, Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls didn't. And no matter which candidate you support, you should be thankful that he didn't.
In agreeing entirely with George W. Bush's legal position in fighting Gore's contest of the governor's certification as the winner of Florida's decisive electoral votes, Sauls has helped to pose the cleanest possible question for the ultimate seven arbiters on the state's highest court.
If the judge is upheld, the presidential election can pass to history's tougher judgment, because it will have ended cleanly, with a legal victor. If he isn't, buckle your seat belts.
By stark contrast, the US Supreme Court's justices have given a new twist to Mr. Dooley's observation that more than anything, they follow the election returns.
In this instance, they are as conflicted, unsure, indecisive, muddled, confused, and bereft of direction and purpose as most of the rest of us were on Nov. 7.
The reason that all sides should be severely disappointed at the US Supreme Court's confused signal - shipping a nearly moot matter back to the state court for clarification - is that the court supposedly took this tough case for the purpose of resolving a matter of the highest importance to the country.
To raise expectations higher, it scheduled a solemn but spirited oral argument on almost no notice last Friday. If the purpose was to give guidance to a supposedly anxious nation, it has failed spectacularly.
To be fair, the Supreme Court has at least avoided a narrow, 5-4 decision, in total favor of one side or the other and thus deciding the election preemptively. Bully for them.
It has also at least explained its indecision, using language from a 60-year-old precedent to say of its Florida counterpart, ''there is considerable uncertainty as to the precise grounds for the decision.''
And the court went further, spelling out its confusion on the extent to which the state court's decision authorizing hand recounts was based on the Florida constitution and considered federal election law - and therefore might have conflicted with US constitutional and statutory authority given state legislatures.
If I were on the Florida Supreme Court, fixing up this mess would be a piece of cake. A few of the justices - at least Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and William Rehnquist - were bothered by these issues, but they were in fact minor ones in Tallahassee. This was primarily a matter of resolving several conflicts in state election law and the state court can make this clear in a timely way, perhaps even while deciding the election contests - including the so-called sleeper contests involving absentee ballot application irregularities in two counties (Seminole and Martin) not included in the Gore case.
But in the meantime, the US Supreme Court has let everybody down - Big Time, as Dick Cheney might say.
By total contrast Judge Saul firmly ruled in favor of the proposition that the discretion of local canvassing boards to order or not order manual recounts should be respected. He also decided flatly that the mere existence of large piles of contested ballots (nearly 14,000) is not enough to count them manually; Judge Sauls' opinion claimed that a contestant must show the count would ''probably'' change the result.
And for good measure, he also ruled that partial recounts within a county would not be fair and that counting individual counties without counting the entire state would not be fair, either.
The Gore theory of contests is the exact opposite. The question for the state Supreme Court could thus not be more clear.
The result is going to be legal finality. But political finality will be more difficult as long as those pile of ballots sit there, their message still unknown.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.
