Sounding like a soccer manager whose team was preparing for a crucial game, the Northern Secretary, John Reid, said it was a time for "cool heads and steady nerves".
But at the press conference in Hillsborough Castle's converted stables yesterday morning, Brian Cowen and John Reid both insisted the joint government proposals should not be seen as a league table, where one side scores victories over another. "This is a win-win situation for everybody," said Mr Cowen sportingly.
The political package, delivered to the gates of Hillsborough Castle at 10.30 a.m., was more carefully worded than it was wrapped. Copies of the dull looking, but eagerly anticipated, document lay at the bottom of a cardboard box in the passenger seat of a civil servant's car before being distributed to waiting reporters.
There was a brief scrum in the morning sunshine as members of the media jostled to get the first glimpse of the proposals, much of which had already been leaked in the wake of the recent talks at Weston Park. A surprise package it was not.
Speed-reading the contents, some recipients said they thought unionists would be deeply unimpressed, pronouncing the 10page blueprint "very, very green". A lone paragraph stressing that decommissioning was an indispensable part of the implementation plan looked sparse, compared to a lengthier and much more detailed section on demilitarisation, they said.
Photographers took pictures of journalists perusing the document while cameramen focused their lenses on the reading frenzy. "Trimble will have a hard time selling this," muttered one reporter as he scanned the pages.
Dr Reid began the packed press conference by offering words of sympathy to the family of Gavin Brett, the 18-year old Protestant boy shot dead by loyalists in Glengormley last Sunday night as he stood close to a GAA club with his Catholic best friend. At the funeral yesterday, Rangers and Celtic football scarves were displayed together, a symbol of the friends' different backgrounds.
"Someone's son is being buried; we need to work together to make Northern Ireland a better place," a caller to Radio Ulster's Talk Back said.
As expected, Mr Cowen and Dr Reid spent the morning singing from the same hymn sheet, even if their audience across the political divide in Northern Ireland insisted on humming different tunes.
Both the UUP's Jeffrey Donaldson and the DUP's Ian Paisley said later that they would rather leave the so-called "take it or leave it" document. The SDLP and Sinn Fein adopted a wait and see approach.
"The two governments are closer than we have ever been before," said Dr Reid, flanked by Mr Cowen, Liz O'Donnell and the Northern Ireland Security Minister, Jane Kennedy.
Even a temporary language barrier could not detract from the two governments' efforts to sell the package. After Mr Cowen had answered questions put by a TG4 journalist as Gaeilge, Dr Reid joked that he was sure he agreed with everything the Minister for Foreign Affairs had just said, even if he had not understood.