On Thursday afternoon the shutters came down on a four-week public forensic process which trawled relentlessly through the pent-up emotions, the searing images and recollected personal agonies which constitute the permanent legacy of the bombing of a Co Tyrone town.
The prolonged inquest hearings on Omagh's dead churned up a mixture of powerful feelings and generated scenes which seemed unprecedented in almost 30 years of Northern troubles: priests, policemen and traffic wardens alike in tears and sometimes speechless parents riveted to their seats in dignified silence as they listened intently to accounts of the last moments of their children.
On the surface, Omagh now seems to have reverted to normality. The last of the TV satellite wagons has pulled out. The media tent is closed, the lawyers have hurriedly decamped and the RUC officers no longer politely request the opening of car boots.
The town's leisure complex, the venue of the hearings, has reverted to its daily routine in the indoor swimming pool and water slides, in the fitness and aerobics rooms and on the outdoor pitches.
Yet something is still wrong down on the sunny sidewalks of Market Street, where the buzz of leisurely commerce is like that of 100 other small market towns on a slow weekday afternoon.
Can it be on this spot that a young boy stood, his body blackened and still burning, before the shocked eyes of Constable Andrew Moore?
Was it there that Gary McGillion rose to his feet, dazed and stunned and, as he ripped his burning shirt off, saw his fiancee, Donna Keys, still clinging to the handles of the debris-covered buggy into which the toddler Breda Devine was strapped?
The inquests evoked a myriad questions and challenges, not just for Omagh, but for outsiders and observers who could pause sympathetically for a while and then pass on; for politicians, army chiefs and republican activists - for all who control and dispense the use of lethal force in whatever cause.
And for the multitude of others who condone it, excuse it, justify it or ignore it.
Those questions can be separated into categories: emotional, moral, scientific and political. The primary and simple one, however, was voiced more than once in the past few weeks by next-of-kin, usually a mother or a widow: "How can one human being do that to another?"
We learned the technical answer during the evidence of a scientist who reconstructed the bomb-detonation mechanism. It involved simply turning a timer knob, flicking two switches, stepping out of a car and walking away. Ironically, the mechanism incorporated a double safety device to protect the bombers from premature detonation.
Yet that did not answer the real point of the question: how could those who unleashed this destruction separate themselves from the human consequences of their actions?
How could they disconnect themselves from the common humanity and feelings they shared with their victims?
It is a question as old as human conflict itself and still unanswered. It could be asked equally of an IRA sniper, a UDA assassin or a Bloody Sunday paratrooper.
The reply, if there is one, will generally involve shifting the responsibility away from the personal and on to some abstract external agency or motivation: an ideological cause, necessary retribution or revenge, defence of one's community or simply "orders".
Attempting to make some sense of it, to repair the inhuman disconnection between cold-blooded perpetrator and innocent victim, the families of the Omagh dead and injured instinctively identified one important option.
Again and again the wish was expressed that the world, the wider community, but especially those who had carried out the deed, should see the videos and photographs of the carnage, the broken and blackened bodies, the separated body parts, the exposed brains and intestines.
Most wanted simply to meet face to face those who had caused the mutilation of their loved ones, to look them in the eye. Many insisted they felt no personal bitterness but strongly craved some third-party legal process of justice.
These were, however, the relatives and witnesses who had sufficient inner resources of strength and resolve to attend the proceedings. There were many others, including scores who had been present at the bombing scene but who had suffered no personal injuries or family loss, who simply could not bear to attend the hearings. Medical certificates were proffered, and accepted, by the coroner on behalf of these, including several police officers.
While nobody, court officials, lawyers or journalists, could fail to be moved by the ordeal of those next-of-kin who sat stoically, for the most part, through the graphic eye-witness accounts and the dispassionate, clinical autopsy reports, there was another more uplifting aspect of the inquest proceedings.
Without exception, all the family members who attended were not only comforted but also inspired by the many accounts of the personal bravery and compassion of both civilians and police officers who tended directly to the dead and dying, without a moment's hesitation or thought that there might be a secondary device and that their own safety could be at risk.
There was the young officer who refused to leave the side of a terminally-wounded child, talking to him and willing him not to die.
There was the civilian who brought a large teddy bear to place under the head of an injured schoolgirl.
There were the many, police and civilians, who stayed with one victim or another, accompanying them in the cars, buses or ambulances to the chaotic emergency department of Tyrone County Hospital.
On a sunny afternoon now, in Market Street, the uniformed schoolchildren cluster and chatter and throng the delicatessen counter of a shop for snacks. Cars are parked on both sides of the street, the road is repaired and infill buildings are almost complete on the sites which were ravaged by the explosion.
But all is not normal, nor will it be for a very long time, if ever.
The bombers have moved on, but they carry with them now the accusing eyes of the innocent.