During Donald Trump’s ascendency in the Republican Party, conservative pundits like William Kristol and Ross Douthat engaged in a sort of fan fiction, imagining that Mitt Romney would rescue the GOP by entering the race or enlisting a like-minded candidate.

“He came pretty close to being elected president, so I thought he may consider doing it, especially since he has been very forthright in explaining why Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton should not be president of the United States,” Kristol told The Washington Post after courting Romney in a May 2016 meeting. And if not? “Obviously, if there were to be an independent candidacy, Romney’s support would be very important.”

Romney passed on challenging Trump for president, but did try to recruit someone who would. When that effort soon failed, Douthat wrote this lament: “Of all the strange images of this strange campaign, I find myself particularly struck by this vision: Mitt Romney, pacing alone in one of his many houses, his angst evident in his faintly mussed-up hair, placing pleading phone calls to Republican politicians asking them to run as a third-party candidate against Donald Trump.”

Now, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch’s announcement Tuesday that he won’t be running for re-election has cleared a path for Romney to replace him—and allowed pundits to again indulge in the fantasy that the Never Trump movement has at last found a leader. “Until now, the Republican establishment has lacked a figurehead behind which it could mobilize against Trump,” National Interest editor Jacob Heilbrunn wrote. “If Romney runs for Hatch’s position, he will be poised to challenge Trump in the 2020 Republican primary and to seek to rejuvenate the GOP establishment.”

Dreams die hard, and the fantasy that Romney will lead a revival of traditional conservatism in the GOP remains strong not just among Never Trump Republicans, but many centrists. But it remains exactly that: a fantasy. A Senator Romney would only disappoint the dwindling Never Trump movement, which instead should look to political figures outside of the Washington establishment.