The nation’s top mullet.

For the past week, Salvadore, 34, had been watching the vote totals roll in for the USA Mullet Championships, the annual contest to determine which participants will claim the title for the most compelling coiffure.

Business-in-the-front, party-in-the-back as they say. While the hairstyle peaked in popularity in the 1980s, it had met an ignoble death shortly afterwards, resigned to comedic fodder (and the occasional iconic hipster display).

Yet the style has seen a resurgence in recent years, with the tresses returning to the mainstream.

Salvadore is among the top 25 men’s division finalists seeking the national title. Each named their manes, with Salvadore adopting the sobriquet “The Lord’s Drapes.”

Salvadore had passed each successive hurdle on the way to grasping the golden ring, which was powered by voters on Facebook. He started the final day of voting with a 400-vote edge. But then a last-minute NPR story vaulted several of his opponents into serious competition, including Buddy Campbell, of Weatherford, Texas, and his ​​cascading locks dubbed the “Whistlin’ Kitty Chaser.”

There are also foes like Musio B. Chavez (“The Oregon Trail”) and Andy Forster, a Badger State native sporting “The Wisconsin Waterfall.” They’re all of depicted on baseball card-style imagery in contest materials.

“If that didn’t happen, I was 95 percent sure I was going to win,” Salvadore said. “Now I’m like 69 percent sure I’m going to win.”

Winners will be announced on Oct. 20.

Until then, he’s in mullet limbo.

Salvadore wears neatly-trimmed golden locks that he said have become central to his identity over the past half-decade.

“You don’t choose the mullet,” he said. “The mullet chooses you.”

Salvadore’s road to mulletdom didn’t initially start with unbridled ambition. After all, Salvadore remembers when the hairstyle was viewed as akin to the rattail, the much-maligned adolescent hairdo.

“I never expected to have a mullet this glorious, either,” he…