The generals in Al Gore's army were coming to grips with the idea of losing the war. A ruling by a Florida judge last Friday morning had cleared the way for Katherine Harris, the George W. Bush ally who is also Florida's secretary of state, to announce a final statewide vote tally on Saturday - one that ignored hand recounts in three Democratic counties. The decision left the men who were leading the charge for Gore - campaign chairman Bill Daley and former Secretary of State Warren Christopher - staring into the abyss. Without the hand-counted votes, Harris would surely declare Bush the winner - and Gore's options would evaporate. Bush would throw a victory party, and the calls for Gore to concede would grow deafening. New court challenges, like the one in Palm Beach over the butterfly ballot that led so many people to miscast their votes, would seem like spiteful attempts to delay the inevitable. Late last week, sources told Time, Daley and Christopher quietly informed the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle, that if Gore couldn't win on the hand recounts, the campaign would fold its tent. They cautioned that "the principals aren't there yet" - Gore and Joe Lieberman weren't yet ready to go along - "but they will be." Daley and Christopher would find a way to get the message to them.

Gephardt feared that if Harris certified a Bush victory, House Democrats would start abandoning Gore. "People are saying, Enough is enough," a leading Democrat said Friday. "It's time to be a good loser." To buy time, Gephardt organized a Friday-afternoon conference call for Lieberman and House Democrats. About 120 phoned in to hear Lieberman's pep talk. At 4 p.m., as he was making his case to the members, Gore strategist Bob Shrum broke in with some startling news: the Florida Supreme Court had forbidden Harris to certify the vote on Saturday. The court wanted to hear arguments from both sides on Monday. Lieberman responded with a gleeful bark: "All right!" It wasn't over yet.

Gore was like a death-row inmate walking the long green mile - and getting a temporary stay of execution right outside the death chamber. It was almost poetic that the reprieve came from the seven state supreme-court justices, six of them Democrats, who have been wrangling with Governor Jeb Bush this year - over capital punishment. Within two hours of the court's decision, the Vice President got more good news. The canvassing board in Miami­Dade County decided to begin a hand recount of its 654,000 votes. And a federal appeals court in Atlanta rejected Bush's plea to stop all manual recounts on constitutional grounds.

In the end, Friday might be seen as the great turning point in this ferocious battle - or as a final glimmer of false hope for Gore. As former Secretary of State James Baker, Bush's Florida mastermind, was quick to point out, the state court's action was "not an order on the merits." It merely preserved the status quo until Monday's hearing. What the court ruling did not do, however, was freeze the action on the ground. Friday night, as the overseas absentee ballots were counted, Bush and Gore forces locked into another round of frenzied warfare - claims of recount fraud in the disputed counties and hard questions about 1,000 overseas ballots, most of them from members of the armed forces, that were rejected mainly because they had not been postmarked. Democrats had mounted a coordinated challenge against the military ballots because they would probably lean toward Bush. And over that point, the trench war threatened to escalate into a full-scale culture war. The Bush team charged that Gore was disenfranchising the fighting men and women he wants to command as President. General Norman Schwarzkopf called it "a very sad day for our country." With the overseas ballots tallied, Bush's lead grew from 300 to 930 votes. The Vice President's team believes new Gore votes from the hand recounts might be sufficient to overcome that lead - if the court compels Harris to recognize them. But add the rejected military ballots to Bush's total, and the recount probably couldn't catch him. Republican lawyers were deciding whether to sue over the military ballots.

For both teams, the extreme, conflicting emotions of Friday and Saturday were simply the distilled essence of all they had been feeling since the election. As each day brought one or more court rulings, the loser absorbed the blow and moved on - and the winner didn't bother celebrating. There wasn't time. The lawyers were due in court, and the generals were due on television; they were late for strategy sessions or conference calls with their candidate; they were keeping an eye on the polls and the catcalling protesters, the bickering recount monitors, the flawed, human, sometimes heroic county election-board officials trying to do the right thing despite gale-force political winds and media glare. For all the experience of men like Baker, Christopher and Daley, they had never been here before, didn't know the landscape, couldn't buy a map. They had never tried to win a presidential election that was hanging like a chad. And so they ran on instinct and adrenaline and grit, exhausted, their moods careering from absurd highs to grim lows each day, sometimes each hour. "It's peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys," says a top Gore operative. "We win every day. We lose every day."

For all the candidates' talk about core principles - Gore's duty "to respect every voter and every vote," Bush's fealty to "the laws of the State of Florida" - it was clear from the start that both sides would say or do whatever it took to win. Bush's team was right when it said Gore wanted to count and count until he got the result he wants - but Gore firmly believes he won Florida (and thus the presidency). And the Vice President's camp was right when it said Bush was trying to short-circuit the recount and hang on to his slender victory - because he too is convinced the job is rightfully his. Which is why, amid the mind-boggling array of court filings and counterfilings and dueling press conferences, there was really only one narrative line worth following: Bush's attempts (aided by the Democrats' favorite new villainess, Harris) to shut down the recounts, and Gore's maneuverings to keep them going at all costs. "As long as we're counting, it's not over," says a Gore strategist. A Bush aide puts it this way: "We're trying to run out the clock; they're playing for delay."

Hovering behind the generals and lawyers and foot soldiers on both sides, of course, were the principals, Gore and Bush. Their styles couldn't be more different - Gore his own chief strategist, always on the offensive; Bush relying on staff and playing defense - but they are seared in precisely the same way. They are the only men who know what it feels like to be stalled just outside the White House door. Gore's friend Harry Reid, the Nevada Senator, who has been through two election recounts of his own, got a call from Gore on Monday - a plea not for help or information so much as empathy. "It was just a conversation where he was remarking that he had won a quarter million more votes than his opponent, yet this was coming down to hundreds of votes in Florida," Reid says. For all the talk about how Gore is binging on data and calling the shots from his battle station in the vice-presidential residence - a dining room equipped with his big easel for scrawling ideas and his two sets of laptops and phones - Gore also has time to think about what might have been. If he had carried his home state, Florida wouldn't matter. If his get-out-the-vote people in Duval County hadn't given faulty ballot instructions to thousands of voters, Florida wouldn't be close. But the hand count is his focus; once it is finished, he will be able to move on. "Gore needs this," says a senior adviser. "He needs to know, win or lose." Reid recognized the Veep's sense of isolation. "People feel awkward talking to you. They don't know if you're a winner or a loser," he says. "I was alone a lot. Gore, I'm sure, is also alone a lot."

So is Bush. The Governor spent most of last week holed up at his ranch in remote Crawford, Texas, far from the court battles and the ballot fights and the blizzard of chad, with no cable or satellite TV to jack him into the 24-hour news rush. "We want Bush to stay out of it as much as possible," says a senior adviser. "We want Gore to look like he's desperate, like he'll do anything to win." By contrast, the strategists depicted their man as the very picture of rugged ease, reading the new Joe DiMaggio biography, jogging daily, clearing cedar from a path where he and Laura like to ramble - much the way Ronald Reagan found peace chopping wood.

But with the ranch strategy came more of the complaints that have dogged Bush all year, the persistent concerns about the fortitude of a man who once traveled with his pillow and takes two hours off in the middle of his day. Republicans in Washington wondered what Bush was doing out there in Crawford - sulking? "This is the first test of a leader," said a top G.O.P. official, "and he sometimes looks like he's shrinking."

The Governor's team dismissed the criticism; they've heard it all before. And Bush may not have cnn or msnbc at the ranch, but he has a computer and a phone and uses them to stay in close touch with his team. Every morning at 8 Central time, Bush confers by phone with Baker and Dick Cheney, often joined by campaign chairman Don Evans. At 8:45 there's a wider conference call with Baker, Cheney, strategist Karl Rove, communications director Karen Hughes, longtime Baker aide Margaret Tutwiler, half a dozen other staff members and sometimes Bush. The Governor touches base with Baker four or five times a day and with Rove almost as often. MORE>>

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