Another election season has come, and is nearly gone — and as one of my old sports guy buddies up in Virginia said with a slight chuckle every year when football season rolled back around: I can’t believe I’m still in this racket.

And yet here we are, still doing what we always do, preparing to report the results from election night as they’re released. And unless you vote for “the other guy,” all our problems will be solved, if we believe all that’s promised from commercials these days. Or the country is doomed to failure if we don’t choose wisely, if you believe all the negative ads that spew forth such nonsense every year.

We won’t have to hear all that chatter after Tuesday but more hand wringing about who won or who didn’t will follow as the Monday morning quarterbacking will go on to rehash the results.

I imagine we won’t all be going to hell in a hand basket if so-and-so gets elected, even though you might think so if you’ve bought into the lowest rungs of campaign material that’s come out. We’ll likely continue on as we always do after an Election Day passes, and hopefully we won’t be left wondering why everything seems so bad when each time we turn on the TV someone is telling us about all the things that are wrong with the country or what will likely go wrong in the future if the other side is put in charge.

Let’s hope we all choose wisely and elect only the good candidates who will bring about peace and prosperity for all, starting with improved test scores from our students and lower tax rates and better jobs in and around where we live.

Surely some elected official will solve all our problems and we’ll have nothing but blue skies and smooth sailing ahead, right? But I wouldn’t put all my hopes in that basket. I haven’t seen an election yet that caused everything to magically improve after it was completed and the new leaders took office.

Things don’t always get better right away. And we certainly can’t improve things around here just by reporting the news we find.

Some people who aren’t happy with what we report have turned to all sorts of drastic measures over the years to try to get things their way, all the way up to threatening to sue us over something in the paper or even saying they are going to start their own paper to right all of our wrongs.

Several of those who made such a threat went as far as to actually try it before realizing it’s a lot easier to say you’re going to do something like that than actually pull it off. It’s a lot cheaper to just talk about it too instead of investing in lawyers or printing presses.

Nothing of the sort is ever as easy as it looks.

I imagine plenty of the people we’ve elected to office found it was a lot harder to do the things they promised on the campaign trail than when they actually tried to implement their ideas. And most of them are probably doing the best they can with the resources they have and whatever actual power comes with their titles.

So let’s hope we choose the best and brightest to lead us along this time around, but then again sometimes those are the folks who have sent us down some paths that we didn’t really want to go.

I’m going to try to keep carrying on like this is just another of many such elections to come — just like when I feasted on the latest McRib, that may be around for the last time ever if you believe all the hype the McDonald’s folks are spreading around. I won’t put a lot of stock in that either and just hope the prices on them and other things come down at some point since my eyes bugged out a little and I had to go back in my wallet for more cash when I got the total for my order this time.

Paris Goodnight is editor of the Salisbury Post.