Back in 1990, Michigan experienced a nail-biter election for governor.

Finally, at about 6 a.m. the morning after Election Day, the John Enlger team emerged from a closed-door counting room in a downtown Lansing hotel with jubilant news for the candidate.

“We won!”

The two words reverberated throughout the ballroom and Capitol press corps like a California wildfire. History in the making. Incumbent Democrat Jim Blanchard was toast, when all the polls said he would pop up a winner.

Close, but no cigar.

He lost by the staggering total of about 17,000, which, in statewide balloting, is a razor-thin margin, but a win nonetheless.

Now, if the affable Blanchard had acted like Donald Trump acted 30 years later, instead of calling Engler to graciously concede and congratulate him, he would have instead immediately questioned the close margin. He would have broadly suggested the outcome was stolen, and Blanchard would have commenced on a four-year journey, never conceding defeat and forever saying he won.

It was a stunning upset that Blanchard eventually put behind him. To prove it, there they were — he and Engler, united on the political stage last week, announcing a bipartisan effort to reassure Michigan voters that the 2024 election would be fair, transparent, and on the up-and-up.

And they, along with former Democratic Lt. Gov. John Cherry and former state Senate Republican leader Mike Bishop, warned that if anybody (no need to name names) was planting seeds to suggest the election would be rigged, the newly formed Protect the Democracy Project would call those persons out to prevent any more angst among the citizenry that Michigan elections can be manipulated.

Note that Trump has repeated that, if the Democrats win, they will have cheated.

“It’s counterproductive to the candidate, I believe,” Engler said. “I would not say to you — being Mr. Trump or the people around him or anybody else — it’s rigged before it’s even been held.”

Engler’s Democratic now-amigo, Blanchard, drove home the warning:

“We want to make sure that, when people raise the idea that elections are rigged or because there is fraud, that we can make sure everything is investigated, but we will beat it down.”

Cherry advises those who do that will be “called out.”

The good-government types out there will unanimously applaud the effort as a noble one, but how in the world can they pull it off?

Are they going to hire a bunch of election-rhetoric detectives to ferret out this “sowing?”

Not likely.

They did say they would be talking to the media about any anti-election statements in order to balance out the coverage.

But, with so much questionable verbiage on social media — not to mention TV ads — they’d have to spend hours pawing over that stuff to refute it.

So, while the mission itself is noteworthy and the show of bipartisan cooperation takes us back to those days when it was the currency of the land in his town — not like today, when mistrust is — it remains a work in progress on what good it will do.

Perhaps the effort’s greater worth will be discovered after the election, as the betting money is that Trump and Co. will reprise the allegations of four years ago if they lose again.