The latest summit-crunch-intensive talks to advance the Northern political situation failed to grip the world's press last week, writes Fionnuala O Connor.
Yet as the most acute of by-standing analysts at Leeds Castle put it: "The seemingly impossible was universally acknowledged to have been cracked."
There was no hoopla, but those who've stuck with the story saw a sizeable breakthrough arrive cloaked modestly in under-statement. In the opinion of many who have trekked uphill too often only to stand for days in dust clouds of spin, anti-climax is just the ticket.
It has the right shape to it, the right size and tone. Too many big set pieces on the back of too much death and misery have spoiled the appetite for further "final" gestures. By Wednesday night the inevitable whiffling over details ensured a lasting impression drained of drama.
The most intractable of issues may finally have been resolved, the IRA refusal to declare themselves extinct, which has dogged development for the past six years. For a web of reasons it suits many to downplay the effect.
The IRA through Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness convey to Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern that they will, in a defined period, go out of existence as a secret army and dispose of their weapons in a way that is visible and can be measured. In immediate response to the Blair/Ahern report of this to him, Ian Paisley says: "We have never been closer to solving the problems that have plagued us for decades".
Presentation and resolute under-reporting ensured that the reaction was more yawn than yippee, but, by any standard, this was a powerful sequence.
There is a useful marker in a Paisley prophesy of the past, when he trudged up to Stormont to shame the unionists at the table in the run-up to the Belfast Agreement and announced: "No matter what happens in these talks, there is not going to be peace, there is going to be war."
After a period when the disappearance of the IRA sometimes seemed unachievable in any form unionists would credit, the DUP leader last weekend - fleetingly but unmistakeably - ceased to be a prophet of doom.
When the Stormont post-Leeds talks petered out on Wednesday night, the issues said to be outstanding were checks and balances on ministerial power and behaviour in North-South dealings, and the method of electing First and Deputy First ministers: issues chiefly remarkable for their modest, bureaucratic nature.
Important of course, central to the working of the institutions, but surely not deal-breakers. Equality and fairness were established long ago as essentials of any settlement, and will not be breached.
Pootering around the detail is essential to let the DUP's grassroots acclimatise to the formerly unthinkable, now around the next corner. Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson promised to replace the 1998 Agreement, but then they also promised to smash Sinn Féin. Now that they are on course to go into government with republicans, they need changes they can present as amounting to a new agreement. Where there is will and brass neck in this process, a way has always been found.
The psychology of the early peace process depended heavily on Irish recognition and outside validation of the Sinn Féin leadership. Put crudely, sustaining progress has meant valuing the Adams-McGuinness leadership at their own estimate, and allowing the IRA to judge when it can safely go out of business.
The psychology of these later stages requires an equally testing exercise: waiting for Ian and Peter to ready their people while pretending not to notice outcroppings of bigotry and the apparently general indifference of political unionism to loyalist paramilitary weaponry, in use much more recently and repeatedly to murderous effect than that of the IRA.
A correspondent flying in from Mars last weekend would have said they didn't reach agreement: boring, no story.
Weary local scribes saw the determinedly unreconciled becoming grumpily reconciled and the IRA, the biggest beast in the jungle, heading calmly and of its own accord for the zoo. Now we have months of tinkering with the choreography, the sequence of next steps.
This is the way it ought to end, not with a bang, but with welcome, increasingly harmonising, whimpers.