The election of Massachusetts governor formally wrapped up Wednesday with Democrat Martha Coakley conceding to Republican Charlie Baker. But reflections on a hard-fought campaign only last so long, before the real work begins.

Bleary eyed Baker staffers stumbled into a room at the Seaport Hotel Wednesday morning. They’d been following returns all night.

Baker finally accepted Coakley’s concession call at 8:15 a.m., 12 hours after the polls closed.

“We talked about the campaign and the race,” Baker told reporters. “And she was extremely gracious in congratulating Karen and me on our victory. And I want to congratulate Steve and the attorney general on a hard fought race.”

Baker looked a little tired as he stood next to his running mate Karyn Polito at the podium. Baker says Election Night was a roller coaster ride. But he understands where Coakley was coming from.

“I think the fact that the Coakley campaign wanted to wait until all the votes were in – look, I’ve been on both sides of this,” he says. “And I thought that was a perfectly reasonable position for them to take.”

In the end, Baker won by some 40,000 votes, or about 1.8%. Coakley’s margins in the cities weren’t as big as they needed to be for her to win, something Baker acknowledged.

“I’m very pleased with the fact that we over-performed how we did in Boston in 2010 by 20,000 votes,” he says. “That would be half our margin of victory.”

Baker is pledging to pay attention to schools and economic development in the cities. But he says his first order of business is to build a team and start the transition process.

To that end, an hour later, Baker met with the sitting Democratic governor, Deval Patrick, to make a very public show of cooperation with his one-time opponent. They discussed the logistics of the transition and a number of the key issues before the commonwealth.

“We have a couple of big issues whose solutions we were working on, like the Connector website which has been fixed, concerns around Ebola and so on,” Patrick says.

At a news conference after the meeting, Baker shared some more reflections on the race.

“One of the messages that came out of the election is people for the most part want their government to behave in a bipartisan way,” Baker says.

And he’ll need that to happen if he wants to get anything done. Democrats have veto-proof majorities in both the state Senate and House. And Baker says he wants to continue the tradition of meeting weekly with the top Democrats.

“I think that process started in the Weld and Cellucci administration and I think it worked exceedingly well,” he says. “And I think there are a lot of important business before the commonwealth and I believe the leaders of the branches ought to be talking pretty regularly about it.”

Incoming Senate President Stan Rosenberg says he’s not concerned about having to work a Republican governor.

“I had the opportunity of chairman of senate ways and means committee to work with Governor Bill Weld,” Rosenberg says. “We got along great. Charlie Baker was secretary of administration and finance. We got along great.”

House Speaker Bob DeLeo also worked with Charlie Baker back in the 1990s. He sent out a press release congratulating the governor-elect and saying he looked forward to working with him again.

The test now is whether the goodwill expressed Wednesday survives the legislative and budget negotiations to come.