Secretary of State Mark Ritchie's word about next week will go down hard with people whose lives since Nov. 4 have revolved around challenged, lost and rejected ballots for Norm Coleman, Al Franken, neither or, occasionally, both.

"The odds are very good that by next Friday evening, we will know how the citizens of Minnesota voted in the U.S. Senate race on Nov. 4," Ritchie predicted. Hard as it will be for some addicted souls to accept, the recount will be over.

"So we'll know who won the election?" I asked on their behalf.

"That's a different question," Ritchie replied.

Therein lies a glimmer of hope for those who are hooked on this most contentious of Senate races -- and discouraging news for all the rest of us, who want it to go away.

The recount in the closest statewide Minnesota election since 1962 might not determine a winner. A court might yet do that. Or the U.S. Senate might.

Mark Ritchie acknowledges those possibilities. He concedes that the four judges who sit with him on the state Canvassing Board have all predicted that the matter will wind up in court. Yet he is so deeply invested in giving the recount rock-solid respectability that it almost seems he will consider any subsequent court contest to be a personal affront.

"We are doing this in such a way that when it is over, the winner will be clear, the loser will know he lost, and it wouldn't cross anyone's mind to go to court to challenge the clear decision of the Minnesota voters," he says.

Minnesota's first-term secretary of state has held up well as the consistently cautious, courteous leader of Team Recount. Ritchie, 56, has stayed on a steady course despite frequent slams on his credibility, often by ignorant people who assume that just because he's a DFLer, he's a party hack.

When his hackles have risen, it hasn't been in his own defense but in that of local election officials. Ritchie considers belittling of them tantamount to an attack on Minnesota's reputation for clear elections, and maybe on democracy itself.

The local officials' Herculean work on this, the largest recount in state history, has more than earned Ritchie's outspoken support. The work is nearly done. The effort initiated Friday by the Coleman campaign to get the Minnesota Supreme Court involved in the rejected absentee ballot issue could put the remaining work in a brief holding pattern and make Ritchie's prediction about next week overly optimistic -- but by days, not weeks.

Yet to be counted are ballots of two types: absentee ballots that were rejected in error and ballots set aside during the recount because someone representing one of the two campaigns didn't like how officials read the voters' intentions (or, more likely, wanted to keep the fog of doubt about the proceedings as dense as possible).

Local officials -- possibly with guidance from the Supreme Court -- were encouraged Friday to count all absentee ballots that comply with the law. Though there are a surprisingly large number of them, upwards of 1,600, their tally shouldn't take long.

The Canvassing Board, meanwhile, will dispatch the challenged ballots. Four of the board's five members are no-nonsense judges of high rank and reputation. Woe be unto the campaign attorneys who waste their time with ballot baloney.

If not on Dec. 19, then surely by year's end, the recount will be completed. One of the candidates will be in the lead.

The other will have a choice. It's the choice my late friend Gov. Elmer Andersen faced on March 20, 1963. He could have pressed on with litigation when the recount ended with him trailing DFLer Karl Rolvaag by 91 votes.

Instead, he concluded that "Minnesotans have had enough," he said years later. He wrote in his autobiography, "it would only contribute to people's lack of confidence in the system" if he pressed on.

Ritchie asked me to relate that story, then sighed: "I do not want to think that we cannot be as great in our time as that generation was."

Lori Sturdevant is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist. She is at lori.sturdevant@startribune.com.