After nine days of nail-biting excitement, the Federal Communications Commission’s auction of the 700 MHz spectrum is beginning to wind down.”

I wrote that over a month ago, and boy was I wrong. Though the FCC is clearly keen to end it, the auction continues to drag on with cellphone companies fighting it out over niggling little bits of 12-megahertz B-Block spectrum in Albany, Ga., Yuba City and Imperial, Calif., Ashtabula, Ohio and Hunterdon, N.J. Apparently, pushing the clocks ahead an hour this past weekend didn’t do much good.

With bidding appearing to have entered the final stretch, the auction has raised nearly $20 billion, double the sum for which the FCC had hoped. Stifel Nicolaus analysts Blair Levin and Rebecca Arbogast predict it will end this week with Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) coming out as the auction’s biggest winners, and Google (GOOG) as a “willing loser.”

C block bidding now stands at $4.74 billion. But what’s most interesting is how it got there. No bids were made for the C block at all Friday, and the $4.71 billion bid for the block’s national license stood. Then yesterday, eight separate bids were made for the individual regional licenses that comprise the national C license. The sum of those bids totaled $4.74 billion, barely eclipsing the $4.71 billion potential winning bid.

Who made them? We don’t know; bidding is anonymous until the auction concludes. That said, analysts speculate that the bids were likely placed by Verizon. “This could reflect a continued battle between two original bidders–most likely Verizon Wireless and Google–on the C block, or could represent an entirely different bidder or combination of bidders that are exiting the sky-high prices of (another) block,” analysts at Stifel Nicolaus wrote in a research note.

Great news for Google, which sought the provision that requires the winning bidder to open the C block spectrum to all devices and software applications. Great news, too, for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who has promised a $10 billion contribution to the federal budget from the auction.

Who placed that $4.7 billion bid? We don’t yet know, as the FCC’s auction rules require bidders to remain anonymous. It’s worth noting, however, that bidding for the C block stalled yesterday at $4.3 billion, just short of the $4.6 billion needed to trigger the open-access provision. Could that $4.3 billion bid have been Google forcing the hand of an incumbent telecom?