Being young and liberally inclined, I don’t think that my reaction was all that different from many of the friends I broached the subject with: oh-my-god-you-cannot-be-serious-what-time-is-he-coming-oh-my-god-to-Blacksburg?-you-have-got-to-be-kidding.

Maybe a little less than that, but you get the idea. So there I was, breaking a prior engagement with a tome on Vietnam (sorry Dr. Pourchot), standing in the lobby of War Memorial Gym, Clinton’s venue, brimming with anticipation.

Later, as Clinton departed from the podium, my first full thought was: I spent more than four hours on my feet, got berated by a woman after her son snatched a T-shirt thrown from the stage from my hands because I was being “rough” and with an old woman attempting (with no small lack of discretion) to read the screen of my BlackBerry in order to hear a speech I had watched in its entirety on C-SPAN last week.

Stump speeches. Can’t beat ‘em.

But Clinton did leave me with one nugget that I hadn’t latched onto the first time. In closing, he pitched his wife (oh, yeah, the one actually aiming to be elected) by asking a simple question: “How will (the president) keep score?”

President Clinton was aiming for, of course, that as president his wife would rate herself on her ability to enact “big changes” in the lives of “ordinary Americans.” But leaving this speech, even though I did seriously feel more connected to the American political process than I had in a long time, I couldn’t avoid the fact that I had spent five hours of my life sitting in a gym for president Clinton to give me “business as usual.”

But walking out of the gym, Clinton came through for me. It was in my departure that I ran into an old friend, a high school buddy I haven’t talked to in more than a year. And as we chatted I learned all the exciting things that he’s aiming to do, how we could easily work together on some projects at the paper, how the once-committed conservative I remember now said the words, “Maybe I’ll vote Democratic this year.” Walking to the parking lot, it occurred to me just how amazing it is that even over the yawning gap of time our personal connections are not quickly forgotten. Parting, I had one of the most satisfying feelings in the world: I had a conversation that meant something.

Take a quick look around the world right now and I think the fact that we tend to think in a score-keeping framework is more than obvious. We wonder whether Jim Zorn will literally score more than Joe Gibbs, who has come up big in the hunt for delegates, whether the right of a Turkish woman to put on a headscarf is a point for Islamic radicalization or freedom of conscience.

Ah, but these are such complicated scores to settle. So with an (complicated) assist from the President, I think I'll score my evening an open-court slam-dunk.