A few months back, I confessed to a fascination with elections, and nothing is bigger than a U.S. presidential election, the Super Bowl of elections.

The big prize, of course … leader of the free world. Other items of interest include one-third of the 100-member Senate decided and all 435 members of the House of Representatives facing election.

As noted in the earlier post, elections are like very elaborate sports events, with winners, losers, strategy and tactics, second-guessing and mountains of statistics.

It’s like Game 7 of the World Series — but a really intense one covered simultaneously by a half-dozen TV network. And it’s usually four or five hours of waiting for the results to come in.

And it happens only once every four years, like the World Cup or Olympics.

I was not going to miss this, certainly not because the results did not really start rolling in until 2 a.m. (Wednesday) in France.

I didn’t move off the couch until the final five states were “not ready to call” for either candidate, neither of whom had reached the 270-electoral-vote victory threshold. Things were stalled for a moment.

By then, it was 7 a.m. and my right shoulder was cramping, as was my back, and my eyes itched from staring at a little screen.

I took the laptop to bed, to check on further developments. I came around from a brief nap at about 8 a.m., just as a winner was determined.

A special attraction of the U.S. presidential elections are how close the events have been in this century. Somehow, American voters seem to arrange themselves into two groups of very similar size, quadrennium after quadrennium.

–In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore (47.9 to 48.4) but narrowly won the electoral college (271-266). This actually was a tough election to follow because not even a night of results-waiting could resolve the competition, and it ended days later with Bush winning a hand count in Florida.

–In 2004, Bush defeated John Kerry in another tight one, 286-251 in the electoral college, 50.7 to 48.3 in the popular vote.

–In 2008, Barack Obama overcame John McCain 365-173 and 52.9 to 45.7 in the popular vote. This passed for a blowout, in this century.

–In 2012, Obama won a second term, defeating Mitt Romney 332-206 and 51.1 to 47.2 in the popular vote.

–And in 2016, barring some late result tweaking, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by 306 to 232 in the electoral college, with the latter winning the popular vote 47.7 to 47.5.

This election was remarkable for how tight was the voting in several key states … a separation of 0.3 percentage points in Michigan, 1.0 points in Wisconsin, 1.2 points in Pennsylvania, 1.3 points in Florida — all won narrowly by Trump after Clinton led early.

I watched it on the laptop, with the New York Times site up on one screen, toggling between a red-and-blue map of the country and a live blog of events as they unfolded … plus fivethirtyeight.com, the poll aggregator, on another screen.

It was tight. And I couldn’t pry myself away from it.

The politics? I try not to get too hung up on that and instead focus on appreciating the competition and the analysis of what happened, and why, and pay rapt attention to that crucial senate race in Wisconsin, etc.

Next big election? France goes to the polls in April (first round) and May (runoff). I hope to be watching.