It was the week when politics won - not a permanent and final victory but success in a significant preliminary skirmish. And it was not the politics of the last atrocity which succeeded, but the politics of the next manoeuvre.
The massive Markethill bomb was intended to throw the talks process off course and to strike a blow at the politics of the next manoeuvre. But it failed.
The Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, has been around long enough to know that incidents like this are always on the cards. Expected at the talks that afternoon, he made a snap decision to go straight to the scene of the bombing instead.
In doing so he sent out an important message of reassurance to his followers and turned the situation to his political advantage. As he was preparing a case against Sinn Fein, this was grist to his mill.
While most detached observers were attributing the bomb to the Continuity IRA, Trimble insisted on laying the blame at the feet of the Provos. Preposterous, some might say. But in taking that line Trimble was giving voice to the gut feeling of many unionists that the Provos, or some of their members, were involved in some way.
Trimble walked to the talks under the umbrella of Provo denunciation. If it emerges later that the Provisional IRA had no hand, act or part in the Markethill attack, almost nobody will remember that David Trimble got it wrong. But they will notice that he is in the Stormont talks and working on a settlement.
The problem facing the Ulster Unionists was this: how to get into the talks without leaving themselves open to the charge of capitulating to the IRA. The answer was to go to Stormont, not in negotiation mode but as inquisitors. Thus the criticisms of the Democratic Unionists and others could be deflected with the response that they had come to eject "the Shinners" and not to embrace them.
There is about as much chance of Sinn Fein being ejected from the talks as there is of the cow jumping over the moon. No doubt the UUP's charges will be heard and recorded in the most solemn fashion: it may even be deemed necessary to refer the matter to a committee where evidence can be received and conclusions drawn. In due course. UUP leaders can come before the television cameras to tell their community how they socked it to Gerry Adams.
After that, it will be next business. And that is the procedural motion from the two governments to break the decommissioning impasse and move the negotiations into their substantive phase.
Here again the UUP will most likely be able to claim that "their" man, the Canadian Gen John de Chastelain, has been appointed head of the body to oversee decommissioning of paramilitary weapons.
The politics of the next manoeuvre: oh, what a glorious time in Northern Ireland when centrestage is held by politicians plotting and planning to do down their opponents. It's a refreshing and wholesome change from the days when the spotlight was on sectarian killers mapping the movements of some hapless teenager hitching a lift home in the evening or a gunman training his sights on an equally-hapless young man in a military uniform.
That is not to say that nationalist youths will not be killed by frenzied attackers or British soldiers shot by diehard republicans. But after the last week such actions are no longer the only game in town. They may even consolidate the determination of politicians to stay at the talks rather than undermining it.
Where the credit for this goes probably depends on your point of view. George Mitchell deserves his share. Republicans and loyalists would praise their respective paramilitary organisations for calling a ceasefire. There will be others to praise government ministers and the leaders of various political parties and factions.
Only at the end of the process can a fair allocation of the kudos be made. But in the recent past a fair amount of credit must go to the hitherto unnoticed silent majority of the Protestant community.
A new army of opinion pollsters armed with questionnaires traversed Northern Ireland, and the results they came back with may just possibly have changed the course of events for decades.
These were the people who came back with the news that Ulster was no longer saying No, but Molly Bloom-style was repeating Yes, yes I will, yes. Big battalions were telling unionist politicians to stay at the talks, and there were even significant numbers in favour of sitting down with Sinn Fein; not to flatter; to tongue-lash them perhaps, but to sit with them nevertheless.
It's been a good week for David Trimble. There is a new confidence in his step, a surefootedness about his decision-making and an incisiveness in his interviews which has reminded observers, almost heretically, of one Gerard Adams Esq.
By holding off their entry to talks the unionists excited the media, cameras flailing about the Europa Hotel, while other parties loitered at Stormont. And the unionists were enjoying themselves. Goodbye the dour image of yesteryear: hello, pro-active, interventionist "new unionism".
There's a sporting chance things will never be quite the same again.