It has been a highly traumatic year in education. Tomorrow pupils, teachers and parents finally discover what impact, if any, this year's industrial action had on the performance of students.
Results will be issued to more than 58,000 candidates. Not all lost time during the bitter strike, but the majority did.
Any negative impact will be coldly counted in points, and if grades are down one can expect parents to vent their frustration publicly.
From November to April, when the dispute raged in one form or other, many observers said this year's pupils would be damaged irreparably.
There was for a time doubt over whether the exams would take place at all. There was talk of the college offer season being delayed. None of this happened, and despite the gloomy backdrop, results and CAO offers will be issued according to the normal time table.
While this year's students had a uniquely hellish year, tomorrow morning they will perform the same rituals as their predecessors.
While you can now obtain results by phone (on 1530 719 290 from midday) or via the Internet (at www.examinations.ie from midday), most of those who sat the examination will still go to their local school and take the plunge with their classmates and teachers. As always, against sensible advice, post-mortems will be carried out and celebrations will be unbridled.
Most observers do not believe the strike has played havoc with marks. In fact, one or two people sneakingly believe the opposite - that examiners have corrected papers in a sympathetic mood and some students can expect a bonanza.
However, the Department of Education's exams branch has inserted so many checks and balances into the system that a major swing in grades, for good or ill, is highly unlikely.
In individual subjects there will be fluctuations, but an overall slide in grades is hard to imagine.
None of this, of course, means a painless week for you or your parents, and chewing nails to the quick remains the order of the day.
With students becoming increasingly sophisticated and specific in their choices, the agony of the CAO process has not dimmed. Students nowadays do not want just any course and often they tie all their hopes and ambitions into one particular five-digit course code.
This correspondent has had many calls from students and parents asking about tiny movements in points.
Tomorrow many students will immediately work out the intricacies of random selection, never mind thinking about actual points.
The CAO process has become clinical, and one of the ironies is that, even though the CAO now encompasses a bewildering 760 courses, many students confine their choice to a small niche area.
Admissions officers point out that despite occasional displays of teenage angst, students pay a lot of heed to their parents' views on colleges, courses and careers. After that, in terms of influence, come older siblings, teachers (career guidance counsellors mainly) and friends.
The traditional conservatism of Irish parents - "Get into the professions, I'm telling you" - has started to wane, however. Look at medicine, normally at the top of the points tree. The numbers putting it down as their first preference have been falling since 1996, whereas interest in technology, art and design, business and arts/social science courses has shot up.
So what will happen this year to points? Few admissions officers are prepared to put their head on the block, but in private the consensus is that points will fall overall.
"The falls will be relatively minor so they will be hard to detect, but speculating on individual courses is very unwise," one admissions officer said. Another said science courses could show further points slippages but possibly not as large as last year.
The biggest change overall this year, according to Mr John McGinnity, admissions officer at NUI Maynooth, is the inclusion of nursing in the CAO. "Putting nursing into the CAO has helped a lot, because it allows students to study all their options at the same time. Previously there was a variation in the timetables for nursing and other offers. Now students can assess everything at once," he said.
Mr Barry Sharkey, admissions officer at the University of Limerick, said predicting the level of students accepting a nursing place was difficult. "It's a totally new system and we just don't know how nursing will affect things," he said.
The colleges meet in Galway at the end of the week to finalise the offers, but until next Tuesday you are going to have to sit, wait and chew those nails a little more.