In Iowa, where he made his move in the polls only two weeks before the January 3 caucuses, Santorum campaigned everywhere, responded at (sometimes tedious) length to every voter question, and cheerfully deflected skeptical press queries like the one I posed to him in mid-December: “Some days, don’t you get discouraged?”

What is already partially lost in the press coverage is how close Santorum came to stopping Romney—or, at least, sending the GOP race into overtime. After a miscount deprived Santorum of bragging rights as the winner of the Iowa caucuses, the former Pennsylvania senator blundered into New Hampshire (his first event was held in a nursing home) without a strategy for competing in a state with a negligible evangelical vote. Maybe if he had gone directly to South Carolina (65 percent of GOP primary voters said they were “born again” Christians), Santorum, rather than Newt Gingrich, would have been the beneficiary of the anti-Romney surge.

But still Santorum, fueled by his February caucus victories, came tantalizingly close to humiliating Romney in Michigan, the state where his father had been governor. Ohio was even closer. Just 42,000 votes—Romney’s victory margin in Michigan and Ohio combined—were all that Santorum needed for a plausible path to the nomination. But press coverage dwindled (unfairly in my book) after Romney swept Illinois—and Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary was the final straw.