On this date 25 years ago, shortly after one in the morning, a Westminster MP elected less than a month earlier died in jail after 66 days without food.
This much is unarguable, although of course it falls well short of the full picture. But it was how many places in the world saw the action of a 27-year-old apprentice coach-builder and IRA prisoner named Bobby Sands.
A path that led to the shape of today's politics began to unroll. If different decisions had been taken in the following couple of months, that path might well have gone in a different direction. Dry assessment today and weighing of ifs and buts is far from the atmosphere of the time, when for months most mornings seemed to bring the detail of more tragedy and the debris of riot or bomb damage.
It was a violent year before Sands first refused food on March 1st. The next months were a relentless sequence of tension and distress, apparent breakthroughs followed by reverses - and there were two very different attitudes in the Northern population towards the possibility, indeed the concept, of breakthroughs.
With a speed that surprised many, attitudes towards the hunger-strike crystallised in the two main communities. Catholics, who hated what the IRA had done for years, developed a passionate dislike of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher's resolve to face down the demand for political prisoner status. Protestants, who had stepped back from unionism with distaste, became angry at the depiction of IRA men as suffering martyrs, and cheered on the British prime minister.
The SDLP and the Irish government pleaded for flexibility to avert more support for republicans. Unionists feared loss of British resolve, nationalists became steadily more anti-British.
Each passing day upped the temperature, and the ratchet began to be wound-up when the list of those willing to refuse food was drawn up, and when Sands started the process. Whether you saw the 10 hunger-strikers who died as heroes, dupes or murderous hypocrites, it was clear that their lives ticked away like a metronome beneath the crash of bomb and bullet. Some argument persists about whether they all believed from the outset that they would die. Most, though, believed that Sands would die: for the rest, hopes and speculation altered by the week and sometimes by the day.
None of it was entirely predictable. This was the second strike inside a year, and it followed successive attempts to create outside support.
Prisoners wearing only blankets or smearing their own excrement on cell walls had not galvanised new followers. It was the sudden death of the independent MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone, Frank Maguire, that made possible the victory of Bobby Sands MP, which in turn enlisted support that created and then fed the push for republican politics.
The Sinn Féin of today was not created overnight - the events of 1981 effectively began the transformation of what had been a despised add-on to the IRA into the assured, often arrogant party which now speaks for the majority of Northern nationalist voters, and rattles nerves in the Dáil.
That shift initially owed more to accident than to calculation or skill. The point is sharply made in Sinn Féin - A Hundred Turbulent Years, the portrait of evolving republicanism by Brian Feeney, who in 1981 was an SDLP politician. He quotes leading republicans willing to admit that at first they saw the hunger-strike as a liability. The decision to run Sands as an "anti-H-Block/Armagh political prisoner" was bitterly opposed by many who saw all politics as compromise, distraction from and inevitably corruption of "the armed struggle". They were right in thinking it would change everything. IRA violence escalated in the 1980s, but republican politics also took root - though with dreadful slowness.
Frank Maguire died five days after Sands began the strike. Feeney quotes Jim Gibney, organiser of H-Block support campaigning, on the initial state of the campaign. "Go back and look at the photographs. The protests were small." Within a month 30,492 people in Fermanagh-South Tyrone made Sands their MP. Some thought, as the world's press flocked in that becoming an MP might save him, but within another month he was dead. More than 100,000 turned out for his funeral.
The defeated unionist Harry West, angry in defeat, was apparently shocked that so many of "my Catholic neighbours", as he put it, had voted in an "IRA man": his election agent and cousin Noreen Cooper put her head down on the stage in the school hall where the count was held, and cried.
Sands's election agent, Owen Carron, subsequently held the seat with an increased majority, running under an even more convoluted label than Sands: "Anti-H-Block Proxy Political Prisoner." Two years later Gerry Adams ran as Sinn Féin and became MP for West Belfast. The rest is history, if still only roughly drafted.