Four years ago, The Free Press did not endorse a mayoral candidate.

It was an exciting race with a close vote but ideas about how to get London on track were few and the choice between the different personal styles of the two leading candidates needed no analysis.

Take your pick: On the one hand, a brash showman with a big personality, bigger talk, an easy touch with voters, and years of political experience. On the other, a stay-the-course incumbent with the kind of practical grasp of how 300 Dufferin Ave. works and what can get done there that comes with, well, years of political experience.

What’s different now? Minus the experience — one of the two frontrunners this time is a rookie, the other a one-term councillor — and, in some ways, not much.

Now as then, London is hungry for jobs and growth. Now as then — but worse — council is cleaved by childish behaviour, gamesmanship and oversized ego.

That’s not much to show for London voters who rolled the dice on a perceived outsider pledging to shake things up and get city hall working like a business again. It’s a scenario worth reconsidering as we prepare to vote again Monday. (You are voting, right? Right?)

As we saw then here and in many Ontario cities, it is easy over the course of a campaign to fall for the outsized personality promising big things.

But is that the kind of leadership this city needs now? Does London need to blow it up and start again, or to build on the baby steps forward made by the last council, rancour and all?

Keep on with a council-endorsed plan to guide London through the next decades, or tear it up? Campaign on what a city hall can practically and legally do, or on things it can’t deliver?

Who best to mend the city’s strained relationship these last years with Queen’s Park and Ottawa?

Given six of 14 ward seats are vacant, who best, rookie or one-term councillor, to guide so many rookies through a billion-dollar city budget, heal the rift between returning incumbents and keep council-floor tantrums in check?

Each of us owes it to the city to ask such questions before casting a ballot. London is lucky to have Paul Cheng’s energy and commitment in the mayoral race.

But for The Free Press, the answer in this city at this time is Matt Brown.