Jeffrey D. Allred for The New York Times

TUESDAY’S PUZZLE — There is a certain timelessness about typical New York Times crosswords. They eschew topical references for several reasons: there is a long lag between construction and publication, syndicated solvers get the puzzles more than a month after that, and most important, puzzles live long and happy lives well beyond their birth dates. They are collected in books that may be sold many years later.

But every now and then, there’s an event so significant, so earth-shaking, it must be memorialized right away, and the backstage machinery here at Puzzle Central cranks into high gear. Why do the rallies in question qualify for this special treatment?

These historical events are amusing enough, but the magic is in the words themselves. Constructors are always on the lookout for paired phrases of equal length, and does this theme ever deliver! It’s a gift from the crossword gods. It’s almost as if Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert dared Will Shortz with an offer too tempting to refuse.

You might wonder why this puzzle appears now rather than on a day closer to the actual event. It’s a Tuesday-level puzzle, and this is the Tuesday before. Sometimes that’s how it works out.

New (to The Times) constructor Chris Handman took up this challenge, and I have extensive notes from him below. I started by mentioning that I’d heard he’s a lawyer.

Notes from Chris Handman

Guilty as charged about my career. For the past decade, I’ve been practicing appellate litigation at a firm here in D.C. It makes for interesting work, particularly because the issues that percolate to the appellate level often present thorny questions of constitutional law or statutory interpretation. Of course, depending on how robust your social life is, your mileage may vary on just how interesting you find any of that.

Although constructing has recently commanded an increasingly large share of my free time, I still make room for some key essentials: going to indie rock shows (despite its traditionally staid reputation, D.C. is a surprisingly good city for music), playing guitar and cooking (my wife and I entertain all sorts of Walter Mitty-like dreams of opening a B&B one day in the [probably very] distant future). We also have an almost unhealthy love for card games and board games (actually, any games, really), which means a few nights out of the month will typically involve some sort of dinner-drinks-and-games trifecta with friends.

Turning to this puzzle, you’re right that it’s my New York Times debut. But it’s actually the second puzzle of mine that Will accepted. About 10 days before I sent the RALLY/MARCH puzzle to Will, I finally received what every aspiring constructor yearns for: the e-mail from Will saying he’ll take your puzzle. That was for a puzzle that I had initially submitted late last year and ended up revising twice in response to encouraging suggestions from Will. For the first 48 hours after hearing that that puzzle had been accepted, I was just stupidly ecstatic (I should add that one reason for the almost criminal level of happiness is that I had submitted three earlier puzzles that had been roundly rejected. Finally breaking through made it extra special).

But I soon began to fret about becoming the Falco of construction. So in whatever spare time I could find, I monomaniacally obsessed over what the next theme should be. And not wanting my sophomore effort to get rejected, I was savagely exacting about the theme’s novelty, cohesion and elegance. The upshot of all that self-imposed pressure was that several days — and several scratch pads — later, I came up with absolutely zero.

And then, as so often happens, I stumbled on an idea when I wasn’t even thinking about crosswords. While watching a recent episode of “The Colbert Report,” I caught a bit where Stephen Colbert was promoting his March to Keep Fear Alive. At some point during that segment, Mr. Colbert posted the Web address for his event, encouraging his viewers to check it out. Then, in one of his I’m-so-clever-but-actually-dumb-as-mayonnaise gags, he told his viewers to be very careful not to go to the Web site for Jon Stewart’s dueling Rally to Restore Sanity, the address of which he then, of course, posted.

What struck me about this — apart from the fact that Mr. Colbert is a comic genius — is that the “www.” and “.com” parts of the two Web addresses didn’t appear to move when Mr. Stewart’s rally replaced Mr. Colbert’s march on the screen. As a word geek who had been obsessed for the past few days with symmetrical theme entries, I immediately wondered whether the names of the two events might contain the same number of letters. Sure enough, by a fantastic coincidence, they both clock in at 20 letters. I then noticed that the coincidences didn’t stop there: each event begins with a five-letter word, allowing the remaining 15 letters to stretch across the entire length of a standard crossword grid. And to top it all off, it didn’t take long to appreciate that “Colbert” and “Stewart” each contained 7 letters, allowing their names to square off against each other in the center of the grid mano a mano. Then, just for fun, I designed the grid so that I could put PAPA/BEAR at the top and EMMY at the bottom.

The only problem was that I didn’t stumble upon this idea until Sept. 28. With the Rally/March set for Oct. 30, that left only a few weeks to get the puzzle accepted, edited, typeset and published. Knowing that it normally takes a few months just to hear whether your puzzle has been accepted — and then several more months before an accepted puzzle ever sees the light of day — I just assumed that this would be a novelty to amuse my friends and family (who have, against their better judgment, graciously continued to test-solve my puzzles after having endured many truly awful attempts in the beginning).

But my wife really loved the puzzle — and said so in a way that conveyed more than just obligatory spousal encouragement — and urged me to e-mail it to Will. As you know, the publication specifications for the New York Times require you to submit your puzzles the old-fashioned way: by United States mail. Needless to say, I was reluctant to bypass that established pipeline and e-mail Will directly, lest he think that, with all of one puzzle now under my belt, I considered myself too cool for mail. But my wife — who thinks Will is adorable (tangent: the first movie we ever saw together was Wordplay) — insisted that Will would appreciate the puzzle and not mind the intrusion, given the time constraints. So after tweaking the puzzle a bit and apologizing in advance for violating submission protocol, I sent it off at 5:32 pm on Sept. 29.

At 5:48, Will wrote back. It’s pretty safe to say that his response ranks as the single greatest e-mail I’ve ever received. Will indicated that he had misgivings about a puzzle whose theme would become dated immediately after publication. But he concluded — and this is the sentence I won’t soon forget — that “it’s too cool not to run.”

Since then, it’s been a fascinating and, I suspect, largely unorthodox collaboration. My sense is that, once a puzzle is accepted, the constructor typically has nothing else to do with it (save for a chat with you or Patrick, perhaps, right before it’s published). But due to the press of time and events beyond our control, it’s been a slightly different story with this puzzle. After Will told me that he was going to run the puzzle on a Tuesday, I offered to save him some time by taking a first crack at revising the clues (which were more Wednesday/Thursday at that point). Will accepted the offer, and I then spent a weekend not only tweaking the clues, but also revising several corners to replace some ugly fill that, had I not been rushing to get the puzzle out the door, would never have made it through my own first-draft standards. The good news is that Will liked the changes, to both the grid and the clues. (Although I’m sure gimlet-eyed crossword critics will find plenty to criticize. I’m still less than proud about EMB, which remains an ugly abbreviation, even though it’s appeared often enough in The Times to be considered legit at this point.) After dashing off those revisions, I assumed that would be the end of things until the puzzle ran.

Not so. As you know, there was a concern about whether the theme would be considered too political or controversial. Needless to say, I had a minor cardiac infarction when I read that e-mail and realized that the puzzle might not run after all. But as luck would have it, the editors saw no problem with this obviously nonpolitical puzzle. And so I figured that this was surely the last I’d hear of the puzzle until it ran.

And as is often the case, I was once again spectacularly wrong. A few hours after the editors gave the green light, you sent an e-mail around to Will, Patrick and me that suggested that the entire theme might no longer be valid. The reason: now that Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert were going to share the same permit and space on the Mall, their two events were now apparently being rechristened as the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. So much for trying to be au courant with a crossword.

But I’m happy to say that our fears turned out to be more imagined than real. So far, at least. Since that announcement, the Web sites for both events have continued to promote the events by their original names (and, for what it’s worth, the official Facebook and Twitter feeds for each event continue to use their maiden names). It seems pretty clear that these events will remain separate entities and continue to be known by their full original titles; they’re just now appearing under the same umbrella (which has received its own name). It strikes me as roughly analogous to a music festival where you have several individual acts performing at a common location. At the end of the day, if you catch an Arcade Fire show at South by Southwest, you say you caught the Arcade Fire show, not the South by Southwest show. That, at least, is my theory. Time will tell whether that’s prescient insight or self-deluding rationalization.