By TIM O'SHEI
Business First

Alice Kryzan watched the returns from the back room of her Amherst headquarters, located in an empty storefront in a Sheridan Drive strip mall. Outside the door, which was affixed with a handwritten "Do not enter" sign to ensure her privacy, a group of about 75 supporters wearing navy-blue "Alice '08" stickers watched the returns on WGRZ-TV.

Early on, the small crowed was jubilant. Kryzan's was a campaign marked by grassroots work and pure hope, evidence of which was stacked throughout the office and stuck to the walls.

In the back of the boxy room, which was bisected by a platform and podium from which it was hoped Kryzan would deliver a victory speech, several long tables sat empty, save for a handful of volunteers whose attention was locked into laptop computers and whose mood grew grimmer as the clock ticked on.

Dozens of folding chairs were stacked against the walls, which were covered with chart paper decorated by blue, yellow, green and purple stick-on notes with the names of volunteers.

One set of charts listed several days' worth of phone-bank callers; another, door-to-door volunteers. Everything was neatly divided: One chart page per day, three hours per shift, four shifts a day. Taped to the chart for last Sunday, Nov. 2 - also a football game day - was an 8.5-by-11-inch piece of computer-printed pep talk. The paper read:

Q: What do Alice Kryzan and the Buffalo Bills have in common?

A: They're both shaking things up, making their opponents nervous, and on their way to victory!

Or not. The Bills didn't win last Sunday, and Kryzan wasn't to win on this night either. At 9:21, when the television flashed the first returns - Lee, 52 percent; Kryzan, 45 percent - a soft "Ooo" rippled through the room.

"It's only 3 percent (of polls reporting)," pointed out a fiftyish, blonde-haired woman who was wearing a business suit and who minutes earlier had emerged from Kryzan's back room. "Is that bad?"

No one answered; no one had to answer - the results spoke to her question. By 9:34 p.m., the gap had widened to 55 percent to 41 percent. Within an hour after that, Kryzan called Lee to concede, stepped into the outer office and took the podium with her husband, Bob, and son, Sam, to thank her supporters.

In a contest that was widely expected to be tight, Kryzan lost by 15 percentage points. Two years ago, industrialist Jack Davis came within four points of beating incumbent Rep. Thomas Reynolds for the seat.

After thanking her crowd, Kryzan, who only occasionally still practices law, told the Buffalo Law Journal that she plans to parlay her congressional run into some sort of public service. "I just hope we have the opportunity to keep working and taking some of these (issues) forward," she said, without offering specifics on what her next steps may be.

She added, "I think it's something I can build on to do even more for the community."