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Hands off, Andy Borowitz! This one’s mine.

In a stunning and sensational development that had political correspondents from Maine to Chesapeake Bay abandoning their families on the beach and rummaging through their luggage for their laptops, Mitt Romney told Hugh Hewitt, the conservative radio host, that he might yet be persuaded to run for President again in 2016. After echoing previous statements that he’s already decided not to be a candidate, Romney appeared to equivocate, saying, “circumstances can change, but I’m not going to let my head go there.”

“Come on,” I hear you say, between splutters, “it can't be true.” Romney in 2016? The star-crossed one-per-center, who crashed out of the 2008 campaign after Super Tuesday and got so badly kicked around in 2012 that he ended up, courtesy of a soft-soap Netflix documentary, as someone to be pitied rather than loathed and feared? The robotic, private-equity tycoon and former Governor of Massachusetts, who has a car elevator in his garage and a silver foot in his mouth?

Yes, that’s the guy. The Mittster, to you and me.

For weeks now, political journalists desperate for something more exciting to write about than midterm primary races in Florida and Arizona have been whipping up speculation about Romney staging a Nixon-style resurrection, blithely ignoring the fact that he has repeatedly said that he isn’t interested in subjecting himself, yet again, to the mercies of Republican primary voters, Democratic dirt diggers, and media tormentors. Back in January, when the possibility of another run was put to him by Ashley Parker, of the Times, Romney replied, “Oh, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no.”

Because political operatives and journalists are skeptical types, such vociferous denials only piqued their interest. They happened to coincide with President Obama’s approval ratings hitting new lows and Romney emerging from his post-2012 purdah. Earlier this year, he started to endorse G.O.P. candidates in this year’s midterms and raised money for some of them. In June, he held a private summit for G.O.P. donors and politicians in Park City, Utah, where one of his five homes is located. According to a report from the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker, the event “quickly became a Romney revival. Minutes after the 2012 Republican presidential nominee welcomed his 300 guests, Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC host and former GOP congressman, urged them to begin a ‘Draft Romney’ movement in 2016.” Rucker reported that Romney even got some encouragement from a Democratic attendee, Brian Schweitzer, the former Governor of Montana, who said, “He would be a giant in a field of midgets.”

With that Post story, the Romney balloon was airborne. This past Sunday, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Paul Ryan, Romney’s running mate in 2012, pumped a bit more air into it, saying, “I sure wish he would” run in 2016. “I think he’d make a phenomenal President. He has the intellect, the honor, the character, and the temperament to be a fantastic President.”

Scarborough, Ryan, and Schweitzer. With the endorsement of a focus group like that, who wouldn’t be tempted to reconsider his options?

Sadly—and here I am speaking as a thrill-seeking journalist rather than as a citizen—the answer is it’s likely that Willard Mitt Romney, a man who, for all his weaknesses as a Presidential candidate, knows a losing investment proposition when he sees one. If you examine the entirety of his interview with Hewitt rather than the headlines it generated, you get a rather different picture of his thinking. Here’s some of the exchange:

Hewitt: If you personally believed, I mean really, genuinely believed, that you were the only candidate who could beat Hillary, and that belief was confirmed by your family, your friends, and your respected political advisers, would you not then feel obliged to run? Romney: Ha, ha. Well, Hugh, the reason I came to the conclusion I did, which is this is not the right time for me to run, is because of my belief that someone else stands a better chance of winning than I do. Had that not been the case, had I believed that I would be best positioned to beat Hillary Clinton, then I would be running. I actually believe that someone new that is not defined yet, someone who perhaps is from the next generation, will be able to catch fire, potentially build a movement, and be able to beat Hillary Clinton. … I think we’ve got a number of very good people looking at this race. I’m expecting someone to be able to catch fire and get the job done.

Hewitt pressed on, unabashed. It was he, not Romney, who first used the line “circumstances can change.” Romney agreed that they could, but rather than seizing upon this possibility he virtually dismissed it. Citing a scene from “Dumb and Dumber,” the 1994 Jim Carey flick, in which the comedian celebrates after being told that he has but the tiniest chance of winning over Lauren Holly, Romney said that there was a “one out of a million” chance that he might end up running. He even explained what he meant. “Let’s say all the guys that were running all came together and said, ‘Hey, we’ve all decided we can’t do it. You must do it.’ Ha, ha, ha. That’s the one out of a million we’re thinking about.”

Was that a not too subtle endorsement for a “draft Romney” campaign? Or was it a bow to reality from a sixty-seven-year-old, twice-defeated Presidential candidate who knows that his chance has come and gone? The latter, surely. But, hey, we can all dream.