On Tuesday I wrote that Occupy Wall Street had grown “too big, and too popular, to shut down completely.” The very next day Bloomberg announced plans to do just that.

Oops.

But then at 6:40 this morning, just twenty minutes before the scheduled eviction, he blinked. (It was later reported that the decision had been made at midnight, but this seems hard to fathom — if so, why let excitement and numbers build for another six hours? Why give OWS the heady catharsis of a last-minute victory?)

Bloomberg suggested in an interview today that interventions by pro-OWS local legislators changed the mind of the company that owns Zuccotti Park, but whether this tells the whole story or not, it’s clear that something happened between Wednesday and early this morning to shift the players’ sense of the politics of the situation dramatically. To announce an eviction and then rescind that announcement handed OWS a huge morale boost, and made any future attempt to remove OWS from Zuccotti Park far more difficult.

This is getting interesting.