In the end, the calendar did M. Jodi Rell one final favor. Thanks to a continuance, it was not until weeks after she departed the governor's office that the State Elections Enforcement Commission finally closed its investigation into the work done on Rell's behalf by a University of Connecticut pollster.

The verdict will not necessitate a very large ice-pack for Ken Dautrich's wrist: a $2,000 penalty, as part of a negotiated agreement in which Dautrich, as his attorney explained, agrees to pay up in exchange for not admitting any wrongdoing. Claims by the former state representative Jonathan Pelto against Rell were dismissed. A parallel investigation with potentially greater relevance -- the attorney general's and state auditors' probe of whether paying Dautrich while he gave extensive partisan and tactical advice was kosher -- still continues.

But if it wasn't much of a climax, yesterday's SEEC hearing was a chance to ponder one last time the amazing internal dynamics of the Rell administration.

Some people take as a remembrance a swatch of cloth, a lock of hair, a seashell. To remember what covering the Rell administration was really like, in its best and worst moments, I'll take this exchange, from Jan. 27, 2009.

In it, Robert Genuario, then the head of the administration's budget office and now a state judge, informed Rell's chief of staff, closest adviser, self-styled Machiavellian lever-puller and slave to Realpolitik, Lisa Moody, that the Office of Fiscal Analysis would like to see a copy of "the Dautrich report."

The Office of Fiscal Analysis is a nonpartisan office that you pay for that tries to understand what state laws and programs cost, and how proposed changes to them will change that cost.

And the Dautrich report was not the political advice the pollster gave the governor about springing tactical traps on legislative Democrats, or the advice he was crafting about polls, his own and those of others. It was the report for which he had actually been hired by Rell's budget office (again, with a planned $223,000 budget made up of taxpayers' funds), which sought to find all the little ways state government was operating inefficiently and losing money it didn't have to.

(At the time, OFA wasn't the only group trying to get its hands on those findings. I was, too. The administration finally relented, after weeks of unnecessary wrangling.)

Anyway, here is the entirety of Moody's response:

"No rush in giving it."

There was a lot to like about Jodi Rell. There was work the administration did that was admirable. There was even value, I thought, in the Dautrich project, at least the part that wasn't secretly intended to help Rell decide which budget positions were more or less possible, or to help those -- like Moody -- who clearly wanted her to run for reelection be comforted about her strong prospects.

But through it all, from the press conference on the first day, when the governor's then-press staff disastrously tried to stiff the print press corps and let Rell enjoy a one-on-one interview outside the Capitol's front door, to the dank highlights of the sycophantic email colloquies of Moody and Dautrich, a theme emerges. If only, Rell's closest advisers so often seemed to think, this governing stuff involved fewer of these encumbering rules to let the public in; if only we could choose the transparency that shows us in our best light.

That attitude looks worst to those of us in the press, because transparency is ours to seek and spread and share. But the attitude also becomes, paradoxically, the worst enemy of even the most fanatically protective partisans.

As in the case of the Dautrich report, where Rell and her buddy, unbidden, had found ways large and small to save the state millions of dollars, the petty impulse to control and stage-manage clouded out the obvious point: to do good work, and to be judged well, or not, on the merits of what you've done for the public.

The last time I talked to Gov. M. Jodi Rell was at the end of a meeting of the State Bond Commission, when Rell had been forced to re-vote items for which she had not been able to marshal the requisite votes the last time around, and had then sat numbly to one side as Bond Commission members from her own party grimly voted against each borrowing proposal she put forward, calling the administration's policy foolhardy in the process.

Afterward, an aide quietly briefed the governor for several minutes as a gaggle of press waited. Eventually, the governor came over and repeated the talking points of the day: handily memorized statistics, pabulum about the outgoing administration's overall record on bonded debt, mellow goodies about good government. It was only at the end that the governor, impatient with the repetitive questioning, ready to be done with all of this, snapped into what always sounded to me like her real voice.

Of the complaints and rhetoric of her fellow Republicans, who were busily predicting the end of the state fisc, Rell said flatly, simply and accurately, that the sky would not fall, and that borrowing, whether politically unpopular at the present time or not, was part of how the bills got paid and the schools got roofed and the trains (should they ever start running) might run on time.

"It's a function of state government," said Rell, speaking directly, from her own conviction, not off the talking points.

If only we'd heard more from her in that office, not the one her handlers, in their wisdom, thought it more advantageous for us to hear.

----------------------

And that screed will be the last. It's been fun writing this blog for The Day, and more fun covering the characters, Democrat and Republican, of Connecticut's government and politics. I'm bound for slightly different shores, but we leave you all in competent hands.

My colleague Matt Collette takes over tomorrow as The Day's political writer. Read him at theday.com, and follow him on Twitter: @ColletteTheDay.

It's been real, folks.