Foyle: Mark Durkan has waited a long time for this feeling, the sweet pleasure of being first past the post.
Durkan's past roles have for so long been supporting ones, his bow always drawn on the second fiddle - a deputy president in college politics, second-in-command at the Union of Students in Ireland, long-time assistant to John Hume.
Yesterday, finally, he was top dog. Not only had he held Hume's Foyle seat and stemmed the Sinn Féin tide, but he achieved this without needing the helping hand of tactical voting by unionists.
The final margin of almost 6,000 votes over Mitchel McLaughlin far exceeded the SDLP's wildest expectations. And Durkan, not normally the most expressive of politicians, struggled to conceal his delight.
"I was written off, and the SDLP was written off," he said in his victory speech.
"People called the election, using the José Mourinho tactic. But like Mourinho, the result didn't turn out the way it was called."
But there were no signs of this extraordinary turn of events as the preliminaries began yesterday morning in the count centre, a characterless sports hall on the outskirts of Derry.
Party officials talked up their respective games in the usual way, but the counting was leisurely, and solid information was hard to come by.
Durkan's do-or-die electoral struggle has been much analysed, but he wasn't the only one fighting for his political life. At almost 60, McLaughlin was probably making his last bid for a Westminster seat.
The first sign that not everything might be going Sinn Féin's way came from the DUP candidate, Will Hay.
Unionist voters had told him on polling day they "loaned" their votes to the SDLP, he said, in order to do Sinn Féin down.
"It's anyone but McLaughlin now," he told reporters. "Sinn Féin boasting has got unionist backs up."
If Durkan were to lose, it wouldn't be for lack of work. The SDLP threw everything at this constituency, knowing the party was dead if it lost its leader.
Potential voters were visited time and again to ensure they didn't succumb to apathy. Durkan's campaign was bolstered by John Hume's constant presence and regular visits from Ministers and politicians from Dublin, including Brian Cowen, Pat Rabbitte and Enda Kenny.
"Hume worked harder in this election than he ever did for himself," said one observer. "But then he never did have to do much to get himself elected."
Veteran socialist Eamonn McCann filled the longueurs at the count, explaining he'd been caught in a "classic squeeze" between Sinn Féin voters wanting to deliver a "killer blow" to the SDLP and moderate nationalists trying to stop the onward march of McLaughlin's party.
Even though his vote was down, "elections come and elections go and we go on for ever".
As the afternoon wore on and the tallymen did their work, the smiles started to disappear from Sinn Féin faces. Party workers started to admit that a Durkan victory was a possibility and blamed the outcome on unionist votes. The tallies for the local elections showed a different voting pattern, we were told.
At 3.30 John Hume arrived, smiling and relaxed and chatting to Will Hay - that wouldn't happen in Belfast. Later, over-zealous security officials barred the former SDLP leader from the count for a time because he had no accreditation.
There was still no sign of McLaughlin, but Martin McGuinness, confident of romping home in the Mid Ulster count, was giving countless interviews. Foyle was "too close to call", he told us, as the news came in of the SDLP's win in South Belfast.
By now, the talk of a Durkan victory was firming up. After 4.30 a phalanx of 80 Sinn Féin workers marched into the men's changing room and locked the door behind them. Twenty minutes later they emerged tight-lipped and expressionless, and most left.
It was now teatime, and the rain was teeming down outside, but SDLP faces were beaming. The mounting piles of white ballot papers in the hall told the story of a widening gap, so wide that talk of tactical voting by unionists was now redundant.
At 5.30pm Durkan and his wife, Jackie, sailed into the count centre, looking quietly confident. For once during this campaign, Dearbhail, their four-month-old, was not in tow.
McLaughlin and his wife, Mary Lou, arrived 40 minutes later, to the muted cheers of their remaining supporters. The gap grew like Topsy - 2,000, 3,000, then 5,000 and more.
Events then took a bizarre turn as boxes from Mid Ulster went missing and were then found in a cupboard. Finally, shortly after 8pm the Foyle result was declared, and Durkan was crowned king of Derry.
If Sinn Féin members felt like throwing in the towel, they weren't showing it. As one supporter said of his candidate's result: "Knocking at the door, Mitchel, knocking at the door."
