KEY POINTS:
DENVER - Delegates were buzzing among the empty convention chairs, scavenging for prized Obama/Biden signs on the floor like strange patriotic vultures when I first noticed her.
She wasn't hard to miss. She was such a beautiful black woman. I wondered if she was an actress. She stood looking back towards the stage Obama had just left moments ago, tears filling her eyes.
Her words just spilled out. "I look at Barack Obama and I think - wow - he looks just like me. He is me. They're not looking at my skin, they're looking at me as a human being - and in America that is a very special thing.
"I don't even know if America understands how far we have come in just these few moments alone; that we can finally be the America we always said we are; America the beautiful, home of the free, home of the brave."
She shook her head, tears now streaming down her face, "My mother was right. I can be anything. I can be the President of the United States."
For her this election isn't politics, it is America finally growing into its skin, its promise - in all its colliding, audacious colours. Just one generation and America can hardly recognise itself.
A crowd of Afro-American caucus members laughed loudly when a former Denver mayor quipped, "Can you imagine a White House where they listen to JayZ and Brickhouse?"
People like Jesse Jackson spent their youth fighting for the right not to have to sit at the back of the bus. Today, his son Jesse Jackson jnr, Obama's co-campaign manager, was born not just with a political silver spoon, but a golden expectation. For him, and millions of my generation, it is just assumed; today's fight is to get a seat at the front of the Oval Office.
The fresh-faced Obama volunteers of all colours have never felt a water cannon at their backs. But for the woman who cried next to me on the convention floor that evening, she saw clearly what I never had to experience firsthand, the huge chasm America has crossed just by an Obama candidacy.
It's all about what could be. Party officials keep squawking the mantra of change, but this week in Denver there's been one inevitable refrain that you hear in real conversations - the now cliched word "hope".
henever I asked, "Do you think Obama will really pull this off?" responses inevitably started with the words, "I hope", though tellingly, seldom "he will".
No one counts this as a done deal. Europe can send 200,000 fans into the streets to chant O-bam-a, but at home there are black voters who don't support him because he is pro-choice, Jews who don't perceive him as friendly enough to Israel, Hillary supporters who may now cross to McCain, and untold others who see his intellectual complexity as wishy-washy.
When Barack Obama walked out on to the podium last night to accept the nomination on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, a sea of 80,000 small US flags waved wildly. Half of America may now see McCain as their choice, but he is getting little of its passion.
At the end of the second night when Hillary passed the baton to that younger black man who stole her chair, comedian John Oliver from The Daly Show stood in a sea of conventioneers swimming towards the exit shouting like a Pentecostal preacher, "Have you healed yet America? Have you healed?"
Obama and the Clintons may have kissed and made up but the bigger question is, if Obama's run for presidency fails, there's no telling what wounds will need America's attention.
