Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to quit the presidential race ignited in us the urge to send him a check for $550 million. We barely know him, but we’re partly to blame for the fiasco, in that we issued more editorials than any other paper encouraging him to throw his hat into the ring. Imagine, then, our chagrin when we discovered we couldn’t quite cover the 550 million sponduluks. So we’ll have to make do with simple sentiments.

Hizzoner, in our view, would have made a better president than any Democrat on the stage, including Vice President Biden, whom he just endorsed. We may differ with a huge part of Mr. Bloomberg’s program — gun control, soda control, french fries control, smoking control, climate control, and his infernal nannyism. Mr. Bloomberg, though, was a terrific mayor, and, we don’t mind saying, a courageous one.

Mr. Bloomberg was already running for mayor when our city and country were attacked on 9/11. He hadn’t, however, yet won the GOP nomination. Sticking with his campaign while Ground Zero was still on fire took some kind of gumption for a man with no history in public life save being an Eagle Scout. Mr. Bloomberg put down a staggering stack — close to $75 million — on winning his first term.

The Sun opposed the mayor on many matters during his 12 years in office. We were shocked by his denial of New Yorkers’ Second Amendment rights. As well as his effort to do away with party primaries. He was indifferent to the city’s tragic abortion rate. We faulted him for focusing on school charters rather than the more visionary idea of vouchers. He had an annoyingly practical streak that our greatest leaders get past.

It has to be said, though, that eight years into the post-Bloomberg city, millions of New Yorkers pine for the esprit and dynamism of the Bloomberg era. Some of the credit for that joie-de-ville no doubt owes to, in George W. Bush, the president with whom much of his first two terms overlapped. Net net — Hizzoner can be proud of his leadership of the city. It’s no small thing.

Which is why we began urging the mayor to run for president. He was several kiloparsecs to our left, but we delighted in the prospect of a race among Hillary Clinton, Mayor Giuliani, and Mayor Bloomberg. We called the prospect the “New York Central.” It would have been good, our editor was heard to quip, for the Sun’s circulation. And great for New York City itself, we thought.

All the more disappointing was Mr. Bloomberg’s presidential campaign. Much has been written about his failure to defend, say, his stop, question, and frisk policing program that helped break the back of crime in the city, particularly against minority citizens. Not enough has been written about the mayor’s infernal hesitation. That was the mother of his Super Tuesday strategy. And the father of his failure to defend his own record.

In February 2008, when Mr. Bloomberg finally announced he wouldn’t seek the presidency that year, we issued an editorial called “Bloomberg’s l’Envoi.” It noted that many said Hizzoner’s real calculation was a reckoning that he just wasn’t likely to win. Yet only hours before his announcement, the mayor had issued a wonderful statement on the death of William F. Buckley.

Buckley’s campaign for New York mayor in 1965, Mr. Bloomberg said, “will live on as one of the defining mayoral campaigns in the city’s history.” That was true, of course, even though Buckley lost. Buckley no doubt understood, even when he began his race, that he faced a likelihood of losing. “It didn’t stop him,” we wrote, “because he had ideas that he wanted to get across.”

In the end, that is where Mr. Bloomberg came up short. We would like to think the race in which he just ran through $550 million might evoke in him a hint of humility. We hope he’ll eventually find adequate solace in his record as mayor. And that he’ll come to develop a more generous view of, in President Trump, the other most famous New York billionaire, who brought ideas, didn’t hesitate, and won.