Sinn Féin's future: Gerry Adams, relaxed and composed, agreed to TV interview after TV interview at Belfast City Hall after he romped home in West Belfast.
Talking to the BBC, Sky and others, he looked ahead to what is to come. Rather than dwelling on the scale of the Sinn Féin surge right across the North, he opted to remark on the big political picture.
What was essential, he argued, was for the two governments to get their act together to help prevent the peace process "going down the tubes".
He reminded his largely British TV audience that he had requested the IRA to leave the stage, and he looked to that organisation's positive response.
It was inevitable and desirable that everyone got back to the business of political negotiations.
Mr Adams had the glow of a strong leader about him. His own vote was emphatic, the trends were positive for the party in Fermanagh South Tyrone, West Tyrone, Newry and Armagh.
Where Sinn Féin was winning, it was winning well. Even where the party's candidates were looking like silver medal winners there were encouraging trends which held the promise of better results in future elections.
The Sinn Féin president allowed himself a side swipe at "our opponents" in other parties and in the two governments, claiming that a campaign of vilification had failed. The "waves of abuse" had come to nothing.
Regardless of South Belfast and Foyle, Mr Adams can surely take a break this summer safe in the knowledge that, come the autumn, he will meet the two premiers armed with a more significant mandate.
Yet for all that, the party will hardly find life so simple in the months ahead.
In London, Mr Adams will meet a re-elected prime minister facing into his final term. Like a US president experiencing the slow draining away of power as his administration runs out of time, the emphasis will undoubtedly shift more in Gordon Brown's direction. He remains more of an unknown quantity from a Northern Ireland perspective.
In Dublin, Sinn Féin will meet the Taoiseach who is still playing hardball with republicans, and whose Government is unlikely to soften its position as the next Dáil election nears.
Within Northern Ireland is it possible that the tens of thousands of voters who have turned to Sinn Féin since 1983 will want results?
Sinn Féin has urged larger mandates on countless doorsteps, saying it will strengthen the hand of those seeking a peaceful future without "armed groups" and who are determined to secure a just political settlement.
How long can the promise be held out while suspension of Stormont and direct rule continues?
Will the nationalist electorate eventually run out of patience before returning to the SDLP, which will begin to cry "told you so" from the sidelines?
Questions for the future, perhaps even the distant future. In the interim, the Sinn Féin support appears solid and enduring.
What is not in doubt is the change in attitude towards republicans from rank and file nationalists across Northern Ireland. The 1980s stereotype, which portrayed every Sinn Féin voter as a working-class supporter of the IRA, is ludicrously out of date.
One party candidate in the Westminster election said privately that what helps sustain Sinn Féin is "the oldest political dynamic around" - namely the desire to see an Ireland free from British domination. Sinn Féin indeed appears to thrive on this, but it is conditional?
Martin Mansergh was surely correct when he commented in this newspaper that there is a much greater appetite for republican politics than there is for republican violence. Sinn Féin's fate, while powered by the "oldest political dynamic", is also inextricably linked to this reality.