Inauguration presented way too much to write about

A newspaper's one giant puzzle, really.

Precisely-sized stories and pictures appear side by side on their pages every day.

That layout isn't magic. It's all about numbers.

One long or enormously important story shrinks the remaining news hole for others.

Editors know this, and reporters are constantly warned to stick to their allotted inch count.

Sometimes, when you're completely enamored with what you're writing about, it's hard to stick to that limit.

Like Tuesday's inauguration.

As part of our inauguration coverage, I was assigned to look at how schools in the Fox Valley were taking in this historic moment.

Among the events going on, Elgin Community College promised a massive viewing party on the first day of its second semester.

Arriving at the college that morning, I found hundreds of students and staff members clustered around a TV in the student lounge, and still more watching the event from a projector in the gym.

I'd start talking to one person, scribble down some awesome quotes on my steno pad, and then start talking to someone else, finding the same thing.

Usually, three or four sources suffice for a 500-word story. But getting swept up in the spirit of such a historic moment, I couldn't seem to stop myself Tuesday at ECC.

I talked to a dozen different people in the span of an hour and a half. And probably could have gone on all afternoon had I not realized that there was no way my story could be any longer than the inches I'd been allotted.

Competing with other reports on Obama's speech, inauguration fashion, Joe Biden's left feet and Senator Kennedy's unfortunate seizure, there was no way all of my could fit.

That doesn't mean it doesn't have value.

Here's some of what was left on the cutting room floor Tuesday:

Joanna Hischke, 19, of Algonquin, headed over to watch the inauguration after her music theory professor canceled class.

"I feel like I was completely detached from politics until this year," she said. Though she didn't vote for Obama, Hischke said her perspective of the President "turned after I heard a speech that he made. I could connect with him, understand his viewpoints on energy independence and foreign policy," she said.

Lashon Broughton, 35, of Carpentersville, made time in between her classes to stop and watch the inauguration on campus.

Broughton, who's studying criminal justice at the school, said her four children between the ages of 16 and 11 are bubbling over with excitement for the election.

The family, she said, believes that anything is possible these days.

And Jacqueline Jackson, a 21-year-old graphic design student, sat rigidly in one of the student lounge chairs, waiting for the inauguration to begin.

Like many of the African-American women I spoke to that day, she said, she never believed something like this could - or would - ever happen.

Jackson, a UPS driver, said she planned to be decked out in head-to-toe Obama gear as she drove her route that night.

As a journalist, sometimes, it's a struggle to come up with enough words for a six-inch story.

Not this time.

Not enough words could describe what was felt in even a small corner of the Fox Valley Tuesday morning.

And that, truly, was an amazing thing to get to report. Even belatedly.