It’s not official yet, but all the indications coming from official channels are that Speaker Boehner will bring to a vote a bill that more or less cleanly raises the debt limit and ends the government shutdown. By doing so, Boehner will finally free so-called Republican moderates to join with Democrats in doing what they’ve wanted to do all along. Sahil Kapur has all the latest here.

In political reporting as in sportswriting, there’s an insufferable tendency to report on things after the fact as if they were clear, indeed obvious — inevitable! — all along. But the assumption that Boehner would come to this point, recognize it, and finally concede has been only an assumption.

There was objective evidence that augured in favor of that assumption, but some evidence that pointed the other way. As pedantic as it is to say it, you really can’t predict the future. So don’t let anyone’s glib I told you so’s now diminish what a high stakes confrontation this was, with uncertain risks and impossible-to-predict outcomes.