Daily Herald columnist Jim Slusher: Super Bowl. Chistmas Day. Election Night.

Election Night has often been described as the newspaper's Super Bowl. It's not a perfect analogy because everyone seems to care about reading, watching and analyzing the Super Bowl, and elections draw a much smaller minority of readers. A true market capitalist would have a hard time justifying the resources newspapers throw into election coverage and election results compared to the economic appeal of the reporting.

But elections have one thing to recommend them that a Super Bowl cannot boast. They are important.

The quality of life in communities, states and the nation hinge on what happens on Election Night. So, we approach it with the fervor such a responsibility demands.

But this year, Michelle Holdway, the Daily Herald News Editor who serves as chief of Election Night Command Central, had an interesting new analogy for our process.

"This is like Christmas Day for us," she began a remotely conducted pre-Election Night newsroom pep rally Tuesday afternoon.

Her point was that, as at Christmas, weeks and months of preparation culminate in a single special day of overwhelming activity and excitement. When it comes to executing an Election Night newsroom operation, the comparison is most fitting.

"It's amazing what we can accomplish in just four hours," Holdway told reporters and editors.

Here's a quick peek at what our editors, writers and photographers managed last Tuesday night: They followed and reported the results of more than 100 suburban, statewide and federal races, first with continuous online updates of individual stories beginning the moment the polls closed and later by sorting them to fit into six printed pages, each customized for editions appealing to the needs and interests of four regions for a total of 24 pages, including scores of headshot photographs and a variety of action photos from around the suburbs, the state and the nation. And they went beyond merely dryly regurgitating results to provide candidate interviews, reactions and analysis.

For those of us involved with the effort, it is a thing of beauty when it comes together.

Of course, it almost never comes together perfectly. This Election Night, we overcame unforeseeable computer problems, inevitable glitches in getting results from various sources and the routine challenge of reporting definitively the outcome of countless races and ballot issues when the results in many cases are constantly shifting.

These days, it's not, I admit with some remorse, the heady, adrenaline rush we experienced in the pre-COVID atmosphere of a crowded, noisy newsroom with bursts of activity everywhere. Now, the activity is taking place in separate dens, living rooms and kitchens, as we work in our separate locales and communicate through email and constant one-on-one phone calls.

But Election Night is still a unique newsroom joy. Maybe we wouldn't trade it for Christmas Day, or even playing in a Super Bowl football game. But we also wouldn't trade it for anything else.

jslusher@dailyherald.com