All this was followed by the joint interview with the president on “60 Minutes,” in which Obama effused that “Hillary will go down as one of the finest secretaries of state we’ve had.” Take that, John Quincy Adams!

He called her “a strong friend.” She called him “a partner and friend.” (In the outside world, they get along fine. But, as Clinton once said in an interview, “We don’t hang out.”) Then on to a seemingly endless set of farewell appearances, including a global town hall, in which she answered a question about “the future of the mineral resources in Antarctica.”

Meanwhile, Tim Geithner retired as Treasury secretary. Did you notice?

Even though she’s probably not going to go home and rest on her laurels, she really does deserve a chance to nap on them. Clinton is 65, and she’s spent the last section of her life working with and competing against people who are generally much younger than she is.

Once, during the presidential race, she told me that she liked seeing me on the campaign plane because it was the only time there was somebody her own age on board. “I just had to tell people what Sputnik was,” she reported.

Women of Clinton’s generation have a special bond with her because she encapsulates their story. She spoke for their rebel youth at her Wellesley graduation, demanding “a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living” than the older generation ever knew. (Was she imagining that it would include 570 airplane meals? The Idaho caucus? Eight state fairs?)

Then Hillary Rodham became Hillary Clinton, the wife who worked to support the family and her husband’s dreams. But somehow, thanks to her talents and terrifying work ethic, she wound up getting a much more spectacular professional life than she could ever have achieved with a normal career trajectory. When she campaigned for the Senate, you could see crowds of middle-aged women cheering like kids at a rock concert for one of their own, who had confirmed their private yearnings for a second, or maybe third, act.

And then there was the first-woman-president dream, which didn’t happen. But she turned the failure into something so positive that it felt like a success. Now her diplomatic period is over. Being Hillary Clinton, she’ll never look back and wonder how many of those 1,700 meetings she could have skipped without endangering the stability of the planet.

No regrets. Onward and upward.