I was struck on Election Day by what a gracious loser Rob Pero turned out to be.

In his concession speech, Pero congratulated the new New London mayor on his victory, pledged his help and urged his supporters to get behind the new administration. It was a commendable performance, one of the highlights of the day.

Michael Buscetto, on the other hand, proved once again what a sore loser he can be, not congratulating the winner at all.

Buscetto said he would hold the new mayor's "feet to the fire" and urged his supporters to do the same.

It was surprisingly unsportsmanlike behavior from someone who talks up sports so much. I guess Buscetto's "One City, One Team" slogan applied only if it could be his team.

But the worst, most unsportsmanlike and graceless behavior of this election season, hands down, occurred Tuesday when Daryl Justin Finizio called a press conference to trample on the will of voters.

The subject was the close vote by which citizens approved the sale of Riverside Park to the Coast Guard Academy, so close, in fact, that a recount has been scheduled for today.

Finizio, who, of course, has not even been sworn in yet as mayor, still very much a private citizen, decided to make public a letter Tuesday from the city's inept law director, Thomas Londregan, saying the contract to sell the park is no longer valid because the closing date has passed.

The letter also suggests a sale can't occur because the city has not complied with state law requiring that it find substitute land to replace what it is selling.

The fact that the whole issue could have moved forward to a referendum without that state law being satisfied seems like another good reason to fire the law director. The trouble is he seems to be the new best friend of the mayor-elect.

I don't know what the solution for a land swap might turn out to be.

But I have bought and sold some houses over the years, and even though I am not a lawyer, I know sellers and buyers change closing dates in contracts all the time without scuttling deals.

For the law director and the mayor-elect to trot this out as a means to wiggle out of this deal, on the eve of a recount meant to determine finally the will of the majority of voters, is, at best, a terrible show of bad faith. There was no suggestion at all of looking at other legal options to fulfill voters' wishes.

It was bad enough that New London became known as a place where they would take your home by eminent domain.

Now it looks like the new mayor is conspiring with the old power brokers of the city to make it a place where the will of voters is ignored and nobody's word is worth anything.

Maybe there are problems with the sale and the contract, but why isn't that the business of the sitting City Council, which brokered the deal in the first place and agreed to let voters decide?

The most unsettling part of Finizio's bizarre press conference Tuesday was when he ended by suggesting that he has kept a campaign promise to treat every neighborhood equally.

"Today, I have the opportunity to show I meant it," he said, more or less taking credit for scuttling the park sale.

There's no shortage of hubris there. And he hasn't even been sworn in yet.

Even before Finizio emerged as their improbable white knight Tuesday, opponents of the park sale raised a lot of baseless complaints about the election.

Among those was the dark suggestion that election laws were violated when someone anonymously placed some Web advertising and sent out postcards advocating a sale.

Any individual is free to do this, and remain unnamed, as long as they spend less than $1,000. It's called free speech.

I think selling even a part of the park is a very bad idea. I was sorry to see it pass on Election Day.

Still, voters were told they could decide. And elected officials should respect the outcome, whether they agree or not. That's what democracy is all about.

I hope the City Council, as they run out the clock, can find a way to respect voters' wishes, whatever they turn out to be today. Maybe one of the council's last acts could be replacing the opportunistic law director.

It's sad, really, that, in the end, it should turn out that the most unsportsmanlike sore loser from this year's historic election was the winner.

This is the opinion of David Collins