It started with 40 or 50 enthusiastic souls meeting monthly.

After Iowa, the number dropped to 20.

By March 3, there were five.

Five lonely Deaniacs left to face an indifferent world.

Some people don’t know when to quit. You can beat them down, strip them of their leader and rob their organization of its members. It doesn’t matter. They stay the course.

Mary, Jay, Laura, Nicole and Mike are like that.

They were at Sharkey’s Pizza last week to decide, in Mike’s words, “where to go from here.”

I had arrived a few minutes early to get a jump on the crowd. The first thing I noticed was a group of chubby men gathered outside the front door. Were these some of the Deaniacs I was looking for?

I decided to ask.

“Are you here for Howard Dean?”

“Howard Dean? Who’s that?” one said, with a chuckle and a glance at his buddies.

I went in and sat down in the party room reserved for the “Meet-Up,” which the Web site said had been canceled due to a lack of support in the Bakersfield area. This one was strictly word-of-mouth.

Mike and Nicole came in a few minutes late.

One look and you could tell they were idealists.

For one thing, they’re young. If you don’t have idealistic bones in you when you’re young, something is badly wrong.

Then there was that glow on their faces, like the halo you see around saints’ heads in Byzantine paintings.

If I was stranded in a bad part of town at night, nothing would give me more relief than to see Mike and Nicole approaching my vehicle.

Mary and Laura soon joined us, two 70ish, white-haired women with the same unmistakable glow. It was like seeing the spirits of Nicole and Mike in elderly bodies.

Mary and Laura really care about people. If they were running the country as grandmother-dictators, it would be a kinder, gentler place.

I found myself wishing I was one of their grandchildren.

My journalistic objectivity almost collapsed when they starting talking about universal health care. For God’s sake, how could I stay objective as a poor, starving, uninsured college student?

I felt a sudden urge to become one of them. When Laura asked me softly if I would like to take home a health care flier, it was all I could do to keep from begging for a membership form.

In the nick of time, I managed to change the subject. How did they explain, I asked, their candidate’s meteoritic collapse?

Jay, the fifth and final Deaniac to arrive, felt that Dean’s big mouth had done him in.

Mary was convinced that an ultra-sensitive microphone was to blame for making Dean sound like a grunting, screaming animal in his Iowa concession speech.

The general sentiment was that Dean was cosmically doomed, like a character in a tragic play.

As the meeting adjourned, Mike seemed to hold out hope that they could stay alive until the Democratic National Convention.

I hope he’s right. Where would we be in a world without true believers?