Slowly, the realization that the conventional wisdom was wrong reached the national and the student press.

At 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, the Associated Press declared that Harvard officials still refused to confirm reports of Summers' selection. But at 2:19 p.m. on Sunday, the wire service moved a single-sentence alert, confirming that Summers had officially been tapped. Yesterday, newspapers from the Globe to the Times to the Washington Post carried stories of their own on the Summers appointment.

The Larry Summers saga found its way into the punditocracy. MSNBC, the Hotline, and Slate.com--all media outlets that scrutinize the operations of the press--examined the evolution of mainstream's press attitude toward the The Crimson's coverage, seemingly critical of the mainstream press's reluctance to cite a student journal.

"What is most interesting about this story is the source," wrote Slate.com in reference to The Crimson's exclusive. MSNBC indicated that the Globe had finally succumbed to pressure to confirm the story it originally dismissed: "It, too, printed the rumor report on Sunday," the organization wrote on its website.

Back at Michigan, the balloon deflated gently and champagne was quietly put away--according to published media reports.

In its most recent issue, Michigan humor magazine "Everythreeweekly" carried a satirical account of a defensive and watery-eyed press conference in which Bollinger was quoted denying that he had ever wanted the Harvard position, "even if the average levels of intellectual talent and interest [at Michigan] are substantially, often depressingly lower than those of an Ivy League school like, say--I don't know--Harvard."

--Staff writer James Y. Stern can be reached at stern@fas.harvard.edu.