As a nation, we would elect either the first black president of the United States or the first female vice president of the United States.

We knew the historical significance of this election a couple months ago, after both parties' national conventions.

Planning for election night coverage, we at the Lake Country Echo agreed to publish the winners of the presidential race. But we didn't consider any stories proclaiming the historical nature of the outcome.

Was that right or wrong? In my opinion, it was a perfectly right decision for the Lake Country Echo, a hyper-local publication.

We knew everyone would have immediate access to the winners of the state and national races, as well as analysis and commentaries of those races, via other media - daily newspapers, radio and television.

The Lake Country Echo usually is printed very early Wednesday morning, and our publication date is Thursday. We didn't figure anyone would be looking to us for those state and national winners two days after the election.

But we may be the only or main source of local election results. So, we have always focused our energies on getting those local city council, school board and township election results on election night.

It isn't easy. Our staff is small, and we worked long hours. We held six pages of our newspaper until early Wednesday morning to provide the most comprehensive results of our local races.

Pequot Lakes and Breezy Point had heated races for mayor and city council positions. Nisswa and Jenkins had races for city council positions. East Gull Lake.had races for mayor and council seats. There were races in Emily, Fifty Lakes and Manhattan Beach.

Through pre-planning, we were able to find out the results of all those races to include them in our Nov. 6 edition, instead of having to wait until our Nov. 13 edition. We were able to find out some results early enough to call and get comments from some winners and losers of what we considered the most contested local races.

We got a lot of results online at www.pineandlakes.com on election night, and we had a lot of people looking for them online.

We were proud to get those results on our Web site as early as possible, and we were proud of the Nov. 6 edition of the Lake Country Echo.

As you'll see elsewhere on this page, at least one Pequot Lakes couple was stunned that the Echo didn't make mention of the historical presidential race.

Does the fact we didn't publish some type of story or editorial mean the outcome wasn't important? Of course not. The outcome of any election is important, no matter if it's president of the United States or mayor of Manhattan Beach.

We used the resources we had to gather the results we thought our readers would want. We don't have access right now to Associated Press news, and we didn't have the staff to spare on election night to pursue a presidential story, or a story on the too-close-to-call Norm Coleman-Al Franken race.

But I think we did an excellent job reporting our local city and school board races, and I'm proud of our staff for churning out what we did in the little time we had to do it.

We never like disappointing readers. But in this case, we truly did put forth the best effort possible and I have no regrets.