From a journalist’s standpoint, he certainly was. And this lame-duck governor certainly kept us busy.

In January 2017, there were the return of his trademark freewheeling news conferences. Since the start of the Bridgegate trial in the fall of 2016, Mr. Christie had been avoiding questions from the local news media. But after 147 days, he relented, and the spigot of potential news, and insults to reporters, flipped back on. Given his closeness to Mr. Trump, any off-topic remark had the potential to make news or provide important context for my colleagues in Washington, such as when Mr. Christie said that he was adamant in his role as the transition leader that Michael T. Flynn should not join the administration.

As the lone correspondent covering New Jersey for The Times, this could sometimes make coverage a little complicated. If I was out reporting a story, I would stop what I was doing to find a place to watch his news conferences streamed on YouTube. Often, this was the front seat of my car, with my laptop propped against the steering wheel and iPhone plugged into the car audio so I could hear; in the summer, with the windows rolled down, this earned me a fair share of bewildered stares.

There was also the near-midnight call I received from his office last spring, after a spate of rail delays and derailments had renewed a common perception of Mr. Christie as the central villain in the state’s transit problems. He had been noticeably silent, but now the governor was announcing that he would instruct New Jersey Transit to withhold all payments to Amtrak until a “full review” could be conducted. It was a vintage Christie punishment, meted out in the middle of the night.

There was the constant willingness to engage in banter with voters, both in-state and out, such as the woman from his hometown of Mendham on Election Day. I had gone to ask the governor a question about the likely election of Philip D. Murphy, but stuck around for the full, 17-minute impromptu conference in a chilly firehouse parking lot. About 15 minutes in, Mr. Christie got into an argument with a voter over town consolidation, sarcastically calling her “fabulous.”