I had to remind myself that there was a time, during the Harkin Steak Fry, the political event of the year for Democrats, in the fall of 2014, before Mrs. Clinton was even a candidate and while Mr. Trump was still a reality TV star, when she had been the media’s obsession. Two hundred reporters had stampeded across the lawn for a glimpse of the most irresistible, dramatic story of what Salon called the “horribly dull political year to come.”

The first woman with a real shot at the presidency, then able to capture the world’s attention with a single flip of sirloin, hardly registered by the time voting approached.

I always figured that this was just how Hillary Clinton would win. It was the painful logic always at work for her: She was expected to project the iron of a commander in chief, the warmth of a best girlfriend and the charisma of a drinking buddy. And if she had somehow done all of that, there would still be some essential quality she lacked, in many people’s minds, because we simply had no template for a female president. The long-suffering feminist heroine would make history not in a festooned lovefest but in a dreary, mechanical slog.

By late fall, the traveling press — called “the Girls on the Bus” since on any given day, of our cohort of about 20 regular reporters, as many as 18 of us were women — were calling it Hillary’s Death March to Victory.