There are easy and hard ways to try summing up Northern Ireland today. The easy way is to sigh that tribal allegiance still swamps real politics. It is a little more difficult to admit real changes.
The ugly IRA has tiptoed off into the twilight. Some Sinn Féin voters almost certainly trooped to the polls on Wednesday in the belief that the party of their choice has had no connection with murder and destruction.
The IRA has held to its "cessation of hostilities" fairly consistently for almost 10 years. There are hundreds too young to remember how leading republicans tried to explain away killings which account for more than half the death-toll of the Troubles.
The ugly Ian Paisley has faded away. It is almost a decade since he told crowds at Drumcree that they must keep on demanding to march down Garvaghy Road, if not so long since his efforts to deny that a young Ballymena Catholic was killed because he was Catholic.
Barring occasional lapses into the old hectoring bombast, and whatever he says in his pulpit, today's DUP leader sounds somewhat different to the man who accused "apostate" ecumenical Protestant clerics of "tripping over each other to slobber on the Pope's slippers".
For a whole generation, the predominant images of Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams are what any election doctor would order - at least in the North. The good-natured old rascal with the towering presence and the vaguely scholarly figure who urges "comradeliness" are made-over icons for new times.
Today's count concludes the first election to have posters and literature which scarcely hit an angry note. Peggy O'Hara, mother of an INLA hunger-striker, was unusual in having posters headed "Smash Stormont". The DUP, which once wanted to "Smash Sinn Féin", this time told voters they were devoted to "Getting it Right". Ulster Unionists, who offended many a couple of elections back with the slogan "Decent people vote UU", this time found a sweet, even saccharine, inclusive theme with "For all of us".
The election campaign seemed dull to the media, and to some canvassers, or so they said. Yet phone-in programmes recorded great tides of calls on the very issues that Northern politics has always been damned for neglecting. All the parties, but especially the DUP and Sinn Féin - who professed not to have encountered the unhappy in their own camps still clinging to old dogmas - reported doorstep obsession with rates increases and water charges. The Paisley demand that Gordon Brown must now pay up to secure any new Stormont is matched by Sinn Féin, though Adams, of course, accuses his counterpart of bluster. It is debatable whether a powersharing arrangement can hold off increases in household bills for long, but experience suggests that between them the two governments will find a three-card trick to give at least the appearance of backing any deal.
One of the most durable clichés about Northerners is that they never forget, that each and every one is a walking mine of grievance dating back centuries.
That perception would be shared, and relished, by many across the Border, and by most of those in Britain who have any interest. As time scuds by, though, there is another perspective. As imaginative rewrites of the comparatively recent past float into the ether from the DUP and Sinn Féin - the two parties whose positions have changed most - the question of how much younger voters know comes into sharp focus.
For the young everywhere, the past is a foreign country. In the North, it is veiled in many ways. If the past is misty, how to gauge the present? Martin Lynch's The History of the Troubles According to My Da has had successful stage runs as a comic take on the partial versions of recent history which even the most superficial observation suggests is relayed inside most homes.
By and large, Northern youngsters, no more than their Southern contemporaries, do not listen to radio or watch television news, much less read serious newspapers.
Family pieties account for a share of misrepresentation, often by simple omission. So some know nothing or very little about IRA car-bombs in city streets, for example, while others have only heard denials of unionist discrimination.
Many who remember bitterly, or whose memories are bitter even if they themselves are not, have painful sights seared into them. Ignorance is not bliss, and the most outrageous distortions and revisions need to be corrected before they become tomorrow's orthodoxy. The bereaved and injured need respect, the dead to be honoured. Some grievance is no more than a proper chronicling. All the same, there might be a useful upside to amnesia.
A soft-shoe shuffle of an election made a pleasant change. There have been too many harsh words: normal service may resume at any second.