For a few moments last Saturday as I walked through the crowds at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, D.C. and tried to press into the spectator throng somewhere near the National Archives around 7th and Constitution, the civility started to strike me as a little dull.

Then, as I relaxed into the moment and listened to -- as opposed to watched because I couldn’t get near a JumboTron let alone the stage -- Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert “spar” and the ensuing audience laughter, I realized what I was experiencing out on the fringes was a really good kind of dull.

Think of it as the sort of good you feel when you’ve finally embraced a meaningful, adult relationship after mostly being in dysfunctional ones. You know, drama-free, no pretense, and built on the premise that there’s so much commonality that the differences can be dealt with in a loving manner. It makes sense. It brings out a certain calm you didn’t know you had in you. It feels like a fit.

Now, in the case of the rally, I don’t mean fit necessarily in the political sense. It was more like a sensibility, a kinship of spirit and good intent, and it started on the journey to get there.

Because friends and I had relied on the Metro system to handle the expected crowd, we were caught off guard by the amount of time it took us to actually reach the National Mall despite arriving in the area in plenty of time. On a crowded train platform, we had to let three trains – roughly 20 minutes apart – pass us by because they were too crammed for us to get on. Yet no one was ruffled. We talked to delightful others and took it as a good sign that so many people were converging on the nation’s capital in solidarity for reasoned discourse.

That’s where the undercurrent of normalcy began and it lasted right on through clever signs – my favorite showed a picture of Thomas Jefferson and said, “Keep me in textbooks. I make sense.” – and the tenor of Jon Stewart’s wrap-up speech.

“If we amplify everything, we hear nothing,” he said, speaking of the 24-hour cable news cycle.

All the post-rally bickering on television and in posts on articles published online about it only validated what Stewart was saying. His words were a call for the media to look at itself and how it’s contributing to the polarization in our country, but don’t count on it. In no time at all, journalists and pundits were already pushing back and not just conservative ones. It’s easier to personalize, dismiss Stewart as a comedian with star power. I have made a pledge to continue what I’ve been striving for with this column, to be a sane voice in the thick of it, but I happen to have a penchant for introspection, navel-gazing if you will, that isn’t the norm in this profession. Look at thyself? Please. Too much money at stake. Too much perceived power to hold on to. Too many egos.

How much easier it is to treat the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear as a sports competition by obsessing about numbers, comparing it to other rallies, questioning strategy. Ho hum.

Here’s what it was: Two intelligent, successful men with their fingers on the pulse of a widespread feeling. Who cares if they were comedians or your local grocery bagger and his kid brother? Comedy works when it resonates and clearly these two comedians are a bridge between the bubbling insanity being expressed in the news each day and the sane among us who are tired of it. That is vision.

I highly doubt Stewart went home and thought all the members of the media were going to hold up a mirror and really look at how they might be contributing to the inflamed, knee-jerk national conversation. But it must have felt awfully good to know for an afternoon he hosted an event that severely challenged the Metro and that drew so many people there were hundreds leaving because they couldn’t get close enough. People were climbing trees for a better view. All of this because they think he’s hit on something.

“We know, instinctively, as a people, that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light, we have to work together,” Stewart said.

Agreed, which is why my second-favorite sign at the rally said, “Civil is sexy.”

That is absolutely, irresistibly so.