I spent nearly eight hours over the weekend (including a 7 p.m. to midnight shift Saturday) at the small, local Obama office entering voter data gathered from the massive phone and door-to-door canvassing effort into the campaign's database. The staff--paid and volunteer--are a mixed bunch, ranging from a young campaign field manager who used to work at a PR firm in Manhattan (he plans to backpack around the country after the election) to a middle-aged character in cowboy attire to retired couples who dote on the younger workers as if they were their own grandchildren. A couple of volunteers are Californians who flew in to help with the last weeks of campaigning in Colorado; "It's so much more exciting here than in California," one San Franciscan told me last night.

The highpoint of the weekend came late Saturday night when Obama phoned in on a (nationwide? swing states only?) conference call to thank his field office staffs for their great efforts and to encourage them to hang tough for the next 72 hours. He acknowledged their shared exhaustion, adding, "Listen, no one needs sleep [right now] more than I do."

By the time Obama called, there were probably only a dozen or so people left in the office. The regular staff gathered around the speaker phone, but turned it up loud enough so that the volunteers, spread around the office on computers, could shyly listen in. Even though I had seen and heard Obama in person the week before in Denver, hearing his disembodied voice rallying the troops in that quiet little office in a suburban strip mall was pretty magical.

And one more thing: Obama used a football analogy to describe his position--as of Saturday night--relative to McCain. I won't repeat it, because I'm overly superstitious about jinxing the election, but I found it pretty hilarious that even a guy who's already made history and may be on the verge of making even more history still reverts to that Y-chromosome-generated tendency to explain the world in sports metaphors.