No, you went to bed on election night with only a portion of the votes counted from largely smaller, red counties, and by the time you’d woken up, they’d finished counting the larger, more urban (Democratic) counties.

You only think it was a chronological narrative because that’s what the media, especially Fox, want people to believe so that it seems more exciting. But the fact is that all of the votes were in but it took a longer time to count the more populous counties, because there are more ballots there to count. And more populous (urban) counties are typically more Democratic.

This kind of thing has happened before, many times. The most famous one was “Dewey Defeats Truman” back in 1948.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman

The newspapers had to be ready for the presses and at the time they finalized their headlines and articles, the conventional wisdom by the paper’s analysts was that Dewey would win by a landslide. Early returns showed a close race but the analysts insisted they were right, the final count would surely align with Dewey.

Sound familiar?