For a piece of this scope, that meant a lot of meetings and phone calls — with current and former aides, with allies and rivals from across his career, with advocates and constituents holding him to account. Many of these dozens of conversations, conducted since the spring, never made it into print in the form of an interview with direct quotes. Yet, almost all of them were helpful, both in advancing our understanding of the subject and in providing information that could be confirmed later with other sources.

Then there was the mayor himself. There can be a strange imbalance in covering politicians for an extended period. You spend so much of your day thinking about them, talking about them, obsessing over their tics — Was that a new line in the stump speech? What’s his angle? Did he get a haircut? — often coming to know them far better than they know you. (This is not to say that they don’t try. Years ago, I was startled when the mayor called me “Fleg” at a news conference, perhaps picking up on my sometimes-nickname used by his aides and other reporters.)

But what distinguishes Mr. de Blasio is how wounded he can sound when reporters, or the general public, do not understand him as he wants to be understood.

In our interview, he raised the matter of the morning routine that has earned him consistent flogging in the press: being driven from the mansion in Manhattan to his old Brooklyn haunts, some 40 minutes by SUV, to get coffee and exercise among former neighbors. “It is my North Star,” he said, “to be reminded of something very human, very local, very grass-roots and to not feel I’m different.”

He talked about the mental health benefits of the arrangement, given the singular stresses of the mayoralty. “There’s a certain finite number of leadership jobs in America that take a total commitment of energy,” he said.

I said this sounded like a pretty good argument against a presidential campaign for a sitting mayor. That was when we stopped agreeing.

Follow the @ReaderCenter on Twitter for more coverage highlighting your perspectives and experiences and for insight into how we work.