You could feel the ache Saturday at the National Building Museum in Washington.

You could see on the faces and in the eyes of Hillary Clinton's supporters.

What was the look? Was it a familiar disappointment, a feeling that again something has been snatched away by larger forces, by the same shadowy obstacles that had limited their own lives?

They clapped and cried and didn't want to end. Neither did Clinton, who after making a gracious concession speech, stayed and shook hands and talked. She wasn't running for anything any longer, except perhaps vice president. But she doesn't get to decide that one and neither do her supporters.

People posed together in pictures, daughters were held aloft. It's rare when history is made in defeat, but there was a sense Saturday that her acolytes wanted to soak in the moment, enjoy while it lasted, even as they felt the curtain coming down with each sentence she delivered.

And then when it was finally over, many felt devastated--even still angry and defiant. In their minds, Clinton had received a raw deal, from the media, from the Democratic Party, and from Barack Obama, who they said had patronized her. They complained about Clinton being asked at one debate about whether she was likable--and about the DNC's decision a week ago to award Obama delegates from Michigan when he wasn't on the ballot.

It wasn't so much that the dream had perished as much as it had been denied--or stolen.

Said Jan Mundo, who came down from New York for the speech on Saturday, "Many of us remain suspicious about how the election was won." Mundo had also come down the week before to the meeting of the DNC's rules committee. She said she would vote for Obama, because Clinton had told her to.

Another supporter, as reported by Tribune's Amanda Erickson, walked out in the middle of the speech, shouting "No!" as Clinton punctuated her remarks by repeating Obama's name again and again.

It's difficult to say whether the hard feelings were triggered by Clinton's choice, in the closing days of her campaign, to embrace a narrative that suggested that votes were not being counted, that the primary process was being undermined. In Florida before the DNC's rules committee met, Clinton compared the ruckus over the Florida delegates to the landmark Bush v. Gore controversy eight years ago, casting the controversy in the starkest, Red against Blue terms.

Earlier, campaigning in West Virginia and other states, Clinton made it clear that she believed her supporters were of a different cut than Obama's, that it was a matter of working Americans versus privileged elites, and her supporters echoed those remarks, seeing Obama as someone who could not represent their interests.

Clinton and her husband, the former president, also suggested that sexism lay at the heart of the way she had been treated by the media, a thread her supporters were all too eager to adopt considering that many have felt their own lives had been affected in similar ways.

And Saturday even as Clinton said her campaign had proved women and girls could be "anything you want to be," there was also a reference to the fact that the final glass ceiling had not been broken, merely cracked by the 18 million people who voted for her.

She had accomplished much, had proven a woman could be a president, could be a commander-in-chief, could be as tough and committed as anyone. But that wasn't enough.

There are still "barriers and biases out there," she said.

And that, more than anything, seemed to resonate. That somehow Clinton's history-making effort had been eclipsed, through an accident of timing, by another historic run, so much so that there was a worry that her achievement might not receive the credit it deserves.

As her people filed out of the Great Hall of National Building Museum, after the energy had dissipated, their expressions were empty and stricken. Saturday wasn't a campaign event, despite the upbeat music and the straw hats, wasn't a party, as Clinton had called it at the outset of her speech. It was a funeral. Not for Hillary Clinton, the politician. She will endure. But for an idea that so many people carried in their hearts for months, even years.

Not this time. Again.