ASHVILLE - Gene Sperling wandered around War Memorial Plaza sometime after 2 a.m. yesterday, oblivious to the rain that was soaking him, listening intently to a cellphone cupped to his ear. What the Gore senior adviser was hearing from other top campaign staff was the news that would explode minutes later among the hundreds of bedraggled Gore faithful with him in the plaza.
''Six hundred and thirty,'' he said when asked what was going on.
Six hundred and thirty what?
''Six hundred and thirty votes.''
Within minutes, word of the astonishing situation in Florida emerged, and everyone else who braved the cold rain and was largely resigned to hearing Al Gore give his concession speech learned that there would be nothing of the kind. What they heard instead from CNN, displayed on two giant television screens on the plaza, was that Gore had called George Bush to retract his concession.
With that, the scene grew surreal.
This jaw-dropper coursed through the crowd, transfusing everyone with new blood. Suddenly, people who had been in tears were hugging one another in disbelief and wondering whether, somehow, their cause might be redeemed. And then the chants began.
''Stay and fight! Stay and Fight!''
And the inevitable ''Fuzzy math! Fuzzy math!''
The change was breathtaking. Moments earlier, the place had resembled a wet funeral. One Gore worker had sat in his shirtsleeves in the rain, his head in his hands, unable to speak. Others stared into space, holding sodden campaign posters, lost in the place to which only losing campaigns are privy.
''It's like having the life sucked out of you,'' said Holly Spann, a longtime Gore volunteer, drenched to the bone yet going nowhere. ''I thought there were a lot of people like me out there. I guess not. It's embarrassing that he didn't even carry Tennessee. He's such a good man.''
Daid Schisgall, who came from New York for the event, refused to give up. ''I'm still waiting for the last return,'' he said.
The swings in Nashville had been vertiginous all night. Election watching in this city was not for the faint of heart, and the Gore crowd displayed true grit through all of it. They cheered lustily whenever a network correspondent went live from the plaza, creating for the cameras a tableau of raised fists. As the evening wore on and the threat of the electoral calculus grew, they maintained their surface insouciance.
There were those among them who had awakened on Tuesday morning with pits in their stomachs. They confessed to dark fears of defeat, both in Tennessee and the nation. Some weren't even planning to attend the rally. But then buoyed by Gore's boffo early-evening showing in battleground states, they came for the chance of victory and, lacking that, the history.
''Who knows when we'll have another native son running for president like this?'' asked Kenneth Chistman, secure in a beach chair, along with his wife, Celita, and their two sons. ''This is history. That's why I wanted to get my boys here.''
The angst of the day flipped to euphoria after dark, triggered by the stunning, if erroneous, news that Gore had taken Florida. As key states like Michigan and Florida then fell to him, the crowd came to believe with a moral certainty that Gore was on his way to an upset that would humble pollsters and pundits alike. ''I don't really believe all those polls anyway,'' Chistman said.
But then Bush stopped the Gore momentum and built his own electoral lead. The mood and decibel level in Nashville ebbed. People paid closer attention to the network anchors and their electoral maps. There was no sanctuary in the numbers that were pouring in.
The rain came about 12:30, driving supporters and reporters alike into the bar of the Sheraton, media headquarters for the Gore campaign. After a few libations and spirited talk around television monitors, they all dashed out again when at 1:18 the networks called Florida for Bush. Gore was said to be on his way to the War Memorial Plaza to give his concession speech. This looked like the last picture show.
The crowd prepared for a wake that never happened. Time passed and changed. Somehow, it was 3 a.m. and Gore campaign chairman William Daley appeared on stage alone to make it official. His last words were: ''We hope to have you back very soon.''
