At the end, all they had to do was put him on the stage.

They had worked tirelessly to create a sense of passion, optimism and credibility about their candidate and boss, a high school geography teacher from their hometown, a guy that virtually no one else had ever heard of when his race for Congress began.

But early in the morning of Nov. 8, that thing they’d struggled to create was happening spontaneously. They didn’t have to say a word.

Hundreds of people — gray-haired grandparents, blue-collar union guys, crazed high school kids, idealistic young adults and liberal professionals — were jammed, shoulder to shoulder and spilling out the doors into the hallway. They were, more or less, out of their minds when Tim Walz took the stage in the ballroom of the Mankato Holiday Inn.

Before Walz was finished making his victory speech, he was surrounded on the stage by the people who’d been crucial in painstakingly creating the momentum that eventually resulted in that surreal scene on election night.

“By the way,” Walz said, looking around at his key campaign staff, “the average age is about 23 up here.”

The Mankatoans

Four of the seven people he called to the stage were women in their 20s who had graduated from Mankato high schools, went off to college and came back to work on Walz’s upstart campaign to knock off six-term incumbent U.S. Rep. Gil Gutknecht. The four — Leah Solo, Meredith Salsbery, Jackie Bateman and Liz Mcloone — were integral to the campaign, particularly Solo and Salsbery, who were there at the start.

For Salsbery, elections had always been about disappointment. A faithful Democrat, she was disappointed in 2000 that she was 18-days too young to vote for Al Gore, disappointed in 2002 that her absentee ballot vote for Paul Wellstone was disqualified following the senator’s death, disappointed in 2004 that her work on behalf of John Kerry went unrewarded.

This one couldn’t have been more different.

“It was one of those life-changing moments,” Salsbery said of looking out at the sea of victorious Walz supporters. “... It was just this big, happy, yellow T-shirt blur.”

Solo said the ecstatic crowd was the culmination of countless days of work by Walz and his team.

“It was what we knew could happen,” she said. “And it really did happen. It was just unbelievable to have that dream come true.”

The transition from the dream phase to the reality phase wasn’t one of happenstance, they said. It came about through hundreds of hours with phones stuck to their ears, through the tens of thousands of miles cruising down the roads of southern Minnesota, through the endless attempts to connect with hundreds of thousands of potential voters.

The beginning