Amid all the talk this week about symbols, such as the RUC name and badge and the Union flag, there was little reference to the fact that the unionists had retained perhaps the most potent symbol of all, the Stormont parliament.
One recalls an RTE interviewer, E, prior to before the broadcasting ban, congratulating a Sinn Fein leader when Stormont was prorogued in 1972. The clear implication was that the republican movement had achieved a major objective. Even before the latest IRA campaign, the Civil Rights movement was based on bringing an end to 50 years of "Stormont misrule".
For nationalists, Stormont was always the hated symbol of their oppression and second-class status. Even now, few people from a nationalist background can travel the long driveway without a slight sense of disbelief that this place could really be the cradle of a new political dispensation based on equality and mutual respect.
But if the new order survives and thrives, we could even see the revival of old plans for a dome and two administration buildings, one on each side of the parliament, which were stymied in the mid-1920s because of what a scribe then called "the demon cost".
The new order still looks shaky, however. Mr Trimble is meant to come out of the starting-blocks this afternoon with an interview on Radio Ulster's Inside Politics. He will doubtless be selling the Hillsborough deal as hard as he can. According to the Times of London yesterday, "Mr Trimble has, in reality, squeezed rather a lot out of Peter Mandelson . . . to the evident discomfort of Sinn Fein and the Irish Government".
The Trimble camp was said to be debating strategy yesterday. Pro-agreement unionists have been focusing so far on the IRA commitment on weapons and the potentially dire implications of a failure to return to the Executive on Monday week.
Nationalists and republicans will find it a trying time. The Blair interpretation of the IRA statement as a potential down-payment on total disarmament caused upset in the republican camp and the Taoiseach had to intervene.
There is an odd symmetry emerging between dissident republicans who claim the Provisionals have given up control of their guns, and unionist supporters who use these charges to bolster their case for a Yes vote.
The best policy for London and Dublin would appear to be silence. But if things are looking bad for the UUP leader by, say, Thursday or Friday, the British government will come under pressure to provide still more crumbs of comfort to the unionist leadership, a prospect that would displease nationalists and republicans not a little.
For the moment the word is that the well is dry and there will be no more concessions. Trimble's job is to get out there and sell, sell, sell.
Behind the scenes the governments must be quietly considering Plan B, i.e. what they do if Trimble loses the vote and Northern Ireland politics is plunged into farce. Should the unionists withdraw from the game, the pan-nationalist consensus would have to consider a new approach, abandoning Stormont and all it entails and placing a new focus on joint sovereignty.
The No camp remains obdurately opposed to Trimble and what they regard as his machinations. They are strongest at the middle level of the party: a sizeable number of activists at constituency level are disillusioned Trimble supporters who were disappointed when he became absorbed by the "Anglo-Irishry" of the Belfast Agreement.
The nagging No camp worry is that it has been as good as it gets in terms of party support and that they can only lose votes between now and next Saturday.
Mr Mandelson has been vociferous in his backing for Mr Trimble, but the No people believe, surprisingly enough, that Mo Mowlam would have been a better card for the Northern Ireland Office to play. The No lobby believes the best it can get is 55 per cent of delegates to the Ulster Unionist Council and says it will be surprised to get more than 51 or 52 per cent.
The key argument appears to centre on the question, posed by the No lobby: "What if the IRA welshes on the deal again, as it did in January?" The counter-argument from Trimble supporters is "Let's put them to the test".
Abraham Lincoln once wrote about a book: "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing that they like", and there is a sense in which the votes of many UUC delegates will be predetermined by attitudes that go deeper than one can readily analyse.
There are pragmatists willing to go for a deal that may offer the chance of maintaining the ceasefire and bringing about permanent stability. They are thought to comprise a third of the UUC. Then there is the element that simply cannot come to terms with the new order.
The vital one-third are in the middle, the people who will be guided by John Taylor, for example, although the Strangford MP has to be careful because the DUP's Iris Robinson is watching his every move with a view to taking his Westminster seat in the next election.
Mr Trimble's campaign is expected to be low-key. Emotion can only hurt him and his cause. The siege mentality is strong among the frontier folk of unionism. The return of Stormont is on offer, but in the words of one historically-minded observer, it is like restoring Grattan's Parliament after Catholic Emancipation.
Can the UUC absorb the lesson that, for things to remain the same, things must change?