Still, there were plenty of moments over the last week when a deal seemed unlikely. The negotiators seemed very close Thursday evening but were plainly discouraged as many of them departed Washington for the weekend Thursday night. When they returned Monday, senators on both sides of the aisle seemed convinced that a deal wouldn't come together. Early in the day, Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar said he thought the hopes for a deal were "remote."

Monday afternoon, the nation's longest-serving senator seemed resigned to the fact that the Senate had finally been lost. "I rise today to speak sadly," Democrat Robert Byrd said, and his words came so slowly that it sometimes seemed that he wouldn't have the strength to finish them. The 87-year-old Democrat looked out across the Senate floor. Ninety-nine mahogany desks sat empty, but not in his memory. "I can see Everett Dirksen as he stood at that desk," Byrd said. He could see Lyndon B. Johnson and Norris Cotton, Jacob Javits and George Aiken. Margaret Chase Smith was sitting in the front row to his right, just as she always had back then. "My heart is sad that it would even come to a moment such as this," he said. "Sad, sad, sad. Sad it is."

What a difference a deal can make. Just after 7:30 p.m. Monday, Byrd stood on a riser in a television studio just above the Senate floor, flanked by almost a dozen of his present-day colleagues, to celebrate the compromise that he helped craft, which he said had saved not just the Senate but the Republic itself.

It was easy to believe Byrd if you'd listened to some Republicans outline what would happen without the compromise. As Monday evening came, Frist briefed reporters on the steps he would take to pull the nuclear trigger: 'round-the-clock debate Monday night; a cloture vote Tuesday morning; a request for a point of order from Dick Cheney, sitting as the presiding officer of the Senate and the tie-breaker on a vote that might need one; an appeal by the Democrats; a tabling motion by the Republicans; the vote on the nuclear option and then a vote to confirm Priscilla Owen to the U.S. Court of Appeal for the 5th Circuit.

Then the questions began: Did Frist have the 50 votes he'd need to win? He said he didn't know. Would he have the vote of Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who had previously called both the nuclear option and the alternative to it "mutually assured destruction"? Frist said he wouldn't presume to speak for another senator. Specter stood at his side, looking uncomfortable and saying nothing.

As Frist took questions from reporters, Senate staffers set up cots in the cloak rooms in preparation for a night full of debate. Aides wheeled in huge carts of food from Costco. John Kerry, leaving the Senate floor, offered a typically Kerry-esque assessment. Would his colleagues reach a deal? Kerry wiggled his hand in the universal sign for "50-50," then shrugged and said, "They could."

At about the same time, a dozen of the 14 senators who ultimately signed the agreement were gathering again in McCain's office in the Russell Senate Office Building, as they had been for hours before the prior week. They emerged close-lipped, promising to tell all at a press conference in the Capitol a few minutes later. But Salazar, a freshman senator who played a major role in the negotiations -- perhaps to make up to his colleagues for offering high-profile Democratic support for the confirmation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales -- couldn't keep it quiet. As he boarded an elevator with Warner within ear shot of reporters, he said: "I think it's a good deal."

Minutes later, most of what had become the "group of 14" were riding together on the underground tram that links the Senate office buildings to the Capitol. McCain and Lindsey Graham were in the back seat together, smiling over a copy of the agreement McCain held in his hands. Graham would later say that he voted for the agreement because he couldn't stand the idea of causing devastation in the Senate at a time when the nation is at war and young men and women are still dying in Iraq.

For McCain, the impetus -- and the satisfaction -- might have been more personal. In leading his colleagues to a deal, McCain presided over a group of moderates and self-styled mavericks who suddenly see themselves as the road to progress in a polarized Senate. And he did so, coincidentally or not, at the expense of George W. Bush and Bill Frist, the man to whom McCain lost in the nasty Republican primaries of 2000 and the man McCain may face in the presidential primaries to come in 2008.

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