It had been "a 25-year election campaign, really", sighed a party activist at Belfast City Hall as counting for the final seats continued on Saturday. But David Trimble still had the adrenalin of leadership as he stormed up the stairs, feigned a profound eight-second interest in some electoral results for the cameras and stormed out again.
Sinn Fein's Gerry Kelly reminded people the unionists still hadn't forced themselves to talk to his party, and Gary McMichael's ghost floated over every conversation after he failed to win a seat for the Ulster Democratic Party in Lagan Valley.
David Ervine who won a seat for the Progressive Unionist Party in East Belfast was "gutted" about the party missing out in West Belfast, which he blamed on "dirty tricks". In contrast, Gerry Adams loped past in jeans and open-neck shirt.
Still, outside at least the sun was blazing above a shiny new era. Or was it?
In West Belfast, some of Mr Adams's senior party members marshalled a few hundred protesters against an Orange march routed past a small number of nationalist houses, en route to Whiterock Orange Hall. The RUC wore flame-retardant balaclavas and riot gear and had rows of armoured cars. An RUC spokesman said no resident had lodged an official complaint about the march.
But as the flutes and drums came into earshot the atmosphere soured. A Sinn Fein councillor urged the media to move back from the RUC lines. "The crowd are following you," he said. And they all moved back.
And thus was the pageantry of Northern history played out in the first weekend of the new era, with a nationalist crowd at bay.
Then the skies opened and a deluge descended. "Just what the Assistant Chief Constable stayed up all night praying for," said a policeman.
It cleared up for the Orangemen, who finally got to parade past the Catholic houses in a march notable not for its festive joy, but for the frenzied, triumphalist, head-wrecking aggressiveness of the drummers (playing with such ferocity that one shattered his drum); the children being whipped up to roar out The Sash at the "appropriate" moment; the sinister UVF colour party (which a police commander claimed not to have seen); the RUC dog-handler winking at an Orangeman; and the few whooping harridans taunting residents with their Union Jacks.
Afterwards dazed residents (some in mixed marriages) swore the march was "at least six bands bigger than last year's" and an Orangeman with a sash took pictures of them. "I never protested before, it never really bothered me before," said a shaking Catholic mother. "But I'm telling you we won't let them away with this next year. I feel so let down."
A mild-mannered man, there as an impartial observer, tried to be even-handed, but concluded: "They were certainly aggressive. I'm surprised because I thought, well, I thought that we were moving towards peace."
But back in the healthier air of the city centre, a parallel universe of innocence and exuberance had exploded as Northern Ireland's young people swayed and samba-ed to the feverish beat of the annual Belfast Carnival parade, flocking to the great, colourful floats, the stilt-alkers and the enormous effigies, in a mighty show of defiance not just of the weather but of the would-be wreckers of what for many of them is truly the dawn of a new beginning.
Dearbhla Murray, a 22-year-old artist, summed up the youthful yearning and years of bewilderment when she recalled sharing Belfast lodgings with other students "who never gave a toss about which side the others came from". Now a Woman's Coalition voter, she looked around at the painted faces and dancing children: "Belfast is ready for this. People are fed up with the nonsense. They're looking for something totally fresh and new."
Nearby, adults praised the peace-makers. An Ulster Unionist voter and former Jeffrey Donaldson fan noted: "The nationalists have got the highest number of votes for the first time." Not only can he live with that but he sees the future in men like John Hume.
"I'd trust Hume. He's going for the domestic things like housing and hospitals and that kind of thing." And that, he said, was what this election was really all about: housing, hospitals, schools, benefit, the mundane nitty-gritty stuff of ordinary life.
In the North at the weekend, this is the truth that was dropping slowly. They have no wish to make history any more. All they want is a hand in running their own lives. Normality.
Yesterday morning the street-weepers were at work as clubbers headed home. Snatches of conversation sounded refreshingly ordinary: "You'll never guess how much Peter and Iris Robinson will be taking home between them," went one.
"Will ya come to Bangor for the night? Ah, come on," pleaded another.