ALLAHASSEE - They came. They counted. They collapsed.
And now they're going home.
With Sunday night's presidential vote certification complete, dozens of Massachusetts Democratic Party operatives who flew to Florida to help with manual recounts, legal issues, and general campaign organizing are heading back to Boston, some feeling sick, most feeling tired, but all trying to stay hopeful that their work would be meaningful in the end.
The task before them now: Nursing their health and catching up on bills, family matters, local politics, and sleep, not necessarily in that order.
''Everybody left today,'' said a front desk clerk at the Palm Beach Lakes Best Western.
Indeed, the frenzy of activity over the last two weeks has been replaced by calm civility in the county formerly known best for Lily Pulitzer pants and Au Bar.
But not before a slew of volunteers, many of whom were burning up vacation days to help Vice President Al Gore's post-election campaign, raced the clock to finish the ballot counting past 5 p.m. Sunday, while hoping they would not miss their flights, booked for that night before anyone suspected the tabulating would creep past the deadline.
Lynda Tocci, chief of staff for state Treasurer Shannon P. O'Brien, Julie Burns, Mayor Thomas M. Menino's deputy chief of staff, and Ken Robinson, head of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, were among those worried they wouldn't get to the airport for their 9 p.m. flight.
Facing two deadlines - the certification and the final boarding call - Burns said: ''I kind of lost track of both.''
Burns, who returned home to stacks of interoffice memos on her desk and the mayor's busy holiday schedule, was running numbers between the canvassing board and the data entry keepers just 12 hours before.
''When they said, `We're going to finish,' [despite the deadline] I thought, oh God, I don't want to leave now,'' Burns said.
The counting was finished shortly after 7 p.m. And a rainstorm delayed their flight, transporting the die-hard Democrats home in time to put their bags down, sleep a few hours and head back to their paying jobs.
''It was really important to everyone to finish what they started,'' rasped Tocci, who left her voice in Palm Beach and was still settling into her State House office yesterday morning. ''But it's hard to call in the results when you can't speak.''
Representative Jarrett Barrios, a Cambridge Democrat, had canceled a vacation in Ecuador, losing a hefty deposit, to help the vice president's efforts here on crisis legal issues and vote recounting.
Barrios flew back to Boston Saturday morning, feeling the weight of his own professional deadlines at the State House.
Not everyone has left, however.
Massachusetts political consultants John Sasso and Jack Corrigan are still in Florida helping the Gore team on strategy.
Mark White, executive director of the Democratic State Committee in Massachusetts, has spent nearly three weeks straight in Palm Beach County, arriving the day after the election. Much of that time was spent observing the hand recount there.
But he's not coming home yet.
White said he won't book the second half of his open-ended plane ticket until he knows whether he'll be called as a witness in the Gore campaign's election contest against three counties filed here yesterday. Or he may need to share his observations with lawyers who will be arguing the case against Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, and Nassau counties' vote certifications.
''I observed what appeared to be thousands of votes that weren't counted,'' he said.
