* As I told you before, Brian Hopkins is a friend of mine going back to our college days. We were actually roommates for a while. Brian won his 2nd Ward aldermanic race yesterday by a wide 56-44 margin.

Hopkins has always wanted to be in public service. He’s also an entrepreneur at heart (he’s owned a couple of restaurants), so that, in my opinion, gives him a good life balance.

Brian served as the executive director of the Illinois Coalition to End Homelessness and eventually went on to win the presidency of the highly influential Chicago community group SOAR, Streeterville Organization of Active Residents. He has both a sound philosophical grounding and an eagerness and ability to solve problems for his people.

But the political game is a lot about luck. Are you in the right district, in the right year, against the right opponent? Heck, people sometimes wait decades for an opportunity to present itself. Sometimes, it never does. Hopkins patiently bided his time, and when the new ward boundaries were drawn, he recognized the opportunity and carefully pieced together a battle plan and a core team, including a very capable fundraiser, Mia Phifer, who proved invaluable down the stretch when Hopkins’ opponent Alyx Pattison was raking in large union contributions.

* One of the issues that Pattison used against Hopkins was the involvement of Victor Reyes and Mike Noonan in Hopkins’ campaign. Hopkins’ benchmark polling, I’m told, showed that it wouldn’t move more than a handful of voters. Hopkins did retaliate, though, by dredging up the imprisonment of Congresscritter Jan Schakowsky’s husband Bob Creamer in a mailer. Schakowsky was one of Pattison’s most prominent backers. It was basically just a little “love tap” to show they were paying attention.

Pattison’s attacks actually backfired because, as the earlier polling had showed, voters didn’t care. Reyes was “Public Enemy Number One” for years among a certain crowd, but he hasn’t been in the news for ages. The attacks energized Reyes and Noonan, who ended up leaving nothing on the field. They put everything they physically had into that race.

* Reyes called me last night to sing the praises of two people. The first was 42nd Ward Ald. Brendan Reilly, an old friend of mine whom I endorsed during his first aldermanic race in my Sun-Times column.

Reyes said he’d run a lot of aldermanic races in his day, but he’d never seen any alderman work as hard to elect somebody else to the city council as Reilly did. Indeed, Ald. Reilly was an early Hopkins backer and pumped in a ton of money ($75K). The guy was absolutely relentless. He wrote the direct mail and produced the TV ads (something he did when he was on House Speaker Madigan’s staff).

Reilly also supplied Hopkins with a campaign manager, Matt Cain. Reilly and Cain were all-in. And not to take anything away from Hopkins, but there would probably not have been such a victory last night without those two very skilled men.

* Reyes said another hero was Kevin Fanning. You may remember Kevin because he was my intern several years ago.

After Kevin got his master’s degree from UIUC, he signed on with Reyes and Noonan. I had some trepidation about that. The Reyes stuff was still kinda fresh. I also wanted him to keep his promise to me that he’d go to law school. But I also knew that most of the attacks on Reyes were just plain goofy (and despite all the confident predictions from his detractors, Reyes emerged without a legal mark on him). And Kevin wanted to do it, so whatever. It’s his life, and he swore to me that he’d complete his law degree. Kevin ran the Jeffrey Tobolski campaign on behalf of Reyes and Noonan against Cook County Commissioner Tony Peraica, who most thought couldn’t be beat. As you may recall, Peraica lost and ended up being convicted for damaging a Tobolski campaign sign.

* Commissioner Tobolski hired Kevin after the campaign and it turned out that Brian Hopkins’ office was right next door. Brian was Cook County Commissioner John Daley’s chief of staff back then. So, I reached out to Hopkins and asked him if he’d please keep an eye out for my former intern. He went far beyond that, however, and became Kevin’s mentor. And when Brian left Commissioner Daley’s office to run for alderman, he recommended Kevin for the job.

Kevin was Hopkins’ original campaign treasurer, and he pushed hard to convince Reyes and Noonan to bring their considerable field operation to the Hopkins race. He eventually took a brief leave of absence from his county gig to work for Hopkins and helped finish the campaign, keeping the candidate motivated and focused on the specific tasks at hand 24/7.

Last week, Kevin was notified that he’d passed his state bar exam. This week, one of his most important mentors was elected to the Chicago City Council. Not a bad few days, if you ask me.

* I’ve known Mike Noonan since former state Rep. Clem Balanoff brought him to Springfield many, many moons ago. He rose through the House Democratic staff ranks and became a star.

Brendan Reilly was also on staff back then, and the two developed a strong rivalry. They seemed at times to be brothers fighting to be the favorite Madigan son. They were constantly griping about each other, while doing their best to outwork and out-succeed the other guy. It worked out great for Madigan, but some very hard feelings built up over the years.

Because of that, the two never worked together after they left the House, until the Hopkins race. From what I gathered, they worked quite well together and reestablished their old friendship. Both Reilly and Noonan sent me this photo of the two of them at the Hopkins victory party last night…

I don’t know if they’ll ever work together again, but if they do, watch out.