For the moment we are left with two memorable snapshots of the week: one of David Trimble and Seamus Mallon, the second of the smouldering rafters of a church.
Mr Trimble, about to become First Minister in the New Northern Ireland Assembly, speaks of a community on a long march from the morass of political violence and political impotence.
Mr Mallon, about to be elected Deputy First Minister, declares that change is no longer an option: "It's an imperative . . . Now, at the end of this century, we are going to change the face of Northern Ireland."
But, within 12 hours of the joint election of a unionist First Minister and the nationalist Deputy, by clear majorities - unionist, nationalist and in the Assembly as a whole - 10 Catholic churches had been set on fire.
In the following 24 hours there were attacks on Presbyterian and Church of Ireland churches, an Orange hall and several other buildings occupied or used by Protestants.
If Mr Trimble, Mr Mallon and their supporters within and outside the Assembly are determined to assert the primacy of politics, others - in fury at the loss of old animosity - are determined to reassert the primacy of sectarianism.
Families Against Intimidation and Terror (FAIT), the organisation which opposes and exposes terror, whatever its source, reports an unprecedented level of intimidation on all sides.
Everyone, says Glyn Roberts of FAIT, experiences "collective dread at this time of the year". Unease and uncertainty are bound to occur at moments of great change.
And this year seasonal fears are magnified by the potential conflict at Drumcree where the Catholics of Garvaghy Road and the Orange Order are already locked in apparently unbreakable combat.
The circumstances are ominous. The Orangemen insist on marking the 80th anniversary of the Somme by breaking an order of the Parades Commission and marching down Garvaghy Road.
They explain their refusal to talk to the residents because Breandan Mac Cionnaith, who speaks for the residents, was once convicted of firearms offences, false imprisonment and hijacking. The target, they say, was the British Legion hall in Portadown.
The one issue on which the Orangemen of Portadown and the people in the Catholic estates off Garvaghy Road seem to agree is opposition to the Belfast Agreement.
Both speak of it with contempt, agreeing with commentators who say that if Mr Trimble and Mr Mallon can't solve the differences surrounding Drumcree, both Assembly and agreement are doomed.
But those best placed to avoid trouble at Drumcree are those most likely to make it. If either side chose to abandon its 20 minutes of spiteful triumph or resistance, it would earn the gratitude of people far beyond its own locality.
As for the commentators, they might do well to reflect on earlier judgments, about the future of the SDLP (old, tired and all but irrelevant, they said); or the fate of Mr Trimble (doomed to fail, they said, not only in his own party but in the Assembly).
The nay-sayers might spare a thought for the man who hit the headlines again of late by forecasting the end of the world for the umpteenth time. He has just promised to give it up if New York is still there by the end of the week.
The Belfast Agreement changed everything, in the North, on this island, in these islands. The Assembly is part of the change.
The executive it elects will be part of it, too.
The authors of the change were politicians of all shades. Those who put their names to it bravely took the risk of seeking the people's approval, in referendums North and South and in an election designed to produce the result which most accurately reflected popular opinion.
In giving it, as the opinion polls showed and the referendum and election results proved beyond doubt, the people returned the favour by obliging the politicians to make the new institutions work.
The change will be reflected in institutional arrangements, designed for a better balanced, more mature and more modern society than that bogged down in the morass which Mr Trimble described.
The institutions will not belong to one community or the other; rights, responsibilities and access to the agencies of the state will be available to all. The opportunity for an open and innovative approach to government challenges both politicians and public servants.
The attitudes of the politicians and their supporters, to each other and their neighbours, will have to change. Nationalists and their parties will have to recognise they are no longer in a state of permanent opposition.
This is something that applies, in the short run to Drumcree, and in the long run must apply to every aspect of politics.
The move towards equality, which began with the Belfast Agreement, was evident in all that happened on Wednesday. As plain to be seen as the end of an old division - on the national question - and the emergence of a new one - on the conditions of the agreement.
There was a time when nationalist parties were all but invisible in the old parliament at Stormont and the opposition seemed to be composed exclusively of members of the Northern Ireland Labour Party.
When Paddy Reynolds of the Irish Press sent me to report on it almost 40 years ago, all I could see were four decent men - David Bleakley, Billy Boyd, Tom Boyd and Vivian Simpson - whose earnest efforts made no impression on Brookeborough's bored, indifferent unionists.
It wasn't until a new generation of nationalist and labour politicians arrived in the 1960s that Catholics started to take Stormont seriously and their representatives moved from old, anti-partitionist demands to insistence on equality and justice.
There was another change. MPs such as Gerry Fitt, Austin Currie, Paddy Devlin, John Hume, Paddy Kennedy, Ivan Cooper and Paddy O'Hanlon were not only more thoughtful and articulate than most politicians of their generation, they could hold their own in London, Washington or Brussels.
When Fitt, Devlin, Hume, Currie, Cooper and O'Hanlon formed the SDLP, they matched in parliament the pressure for reform rising from the streets. By the time Stormont was prorogued and violence came to dominate events, some unionists had begun to see the sense of their case. Too late.
The Assembly in which all parties, from Sinn Fein to the DUP and the UKUP are represented, gives politicians the chance to work where abstentionism, exclusion and violence failed.
And, as Austin Currie said on RTE during Wednesday's long, invigorating debate, one of the most welcome signs is the presence of all shades of opinion in one chamber; the recognition, as Seamus Mallon put it, that they share a common vulnerability - to the electorate.