How thin is the line between recklessness and prescience? About 22,000 votes.

Loyal NCIS viewers probably didn't think so, but when Katie Couric broke into the show at 8:09 p.m. Tuesday to announce that CBS was projecting a Hillary Clinton victory in the Indiana primary, she was actually introducing them to a much more compelling drama than the one they were watching. CBS was the only network to call the tingly-tight Indiana race -- in which Clinton and Barack Obama were never separated by much more than 50,000 votes -- on Tuesday night.

Everybody else held off...and by midnight, with Clinton's lead shrinking to 17,000 as Obama's stronghold precincts in Gary finally began reporting in, it looked like Couric might have to break out the Tabasco sauce in preparation for eating her words. “I have some sympathy for the people on the decision desk over at CBS News tonight, who probably have made the right call, but they’ve made it early and I wonder as the results tighten, if there’s some tightening in the blood veins of some of those people over there who I certainly identify with,” jibed Fox News' Brit Hume.

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Clinton's lead at last edged back out to about 22,000, and other networks began making their own projections for her: MSNBC and Fox News at 1:09 a.m., CNN three minutes later. CBS says nobody there was sweating over the network's early call. “When we made the projection, we remained confident Senator Clinton would carry Indiana based on the information we had gathered about vote projections and the demographic composition of the vote that was yet to be counted,” declares Kathy Frankovic, who directs CBS surveys and sits on the network's decision desk. It's a thin line between recklessness and prescience when it comes to making election projections, but Tuesday night, CBS stayed on the right side by 23,000 votes.