Three days on, the Good Friday agreement still stands - awesome in the very fact of its achievement, in the scale of its ambition, and in the potency of the opportunity it provides for the people of Northern Ireland and of these islands as a whole.
Now for the next summit. The key battles - for the souls of unionism and republicanism - are already joined. David Trimble cleared just the first of many hurdles on Saturday. In five days, the 800strong Ulster Unionist Council will deliver its verdict.
At the same time, in Dublin, Gerry Adams must carry the Sinn Fein Ardfheis.
And it is upon these two men the spotlight will repeatedly fall through the referendum campaigns to the June 25th elections for the new Northern Ireland Assembly.
Much has been written, and rightly, about the astonishing cast of players whose contributions were vital in bringing the talks process to a successful conclusion. Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, President Clinton and Senator Mitchell, Albert Reynolds and John Major have all secured their places in the history books.
There are, too, many unsung heroes - not least the draftsmen who assembled the final text, wading through issues of the utmost complexity to produce a document providing all the clarity necessary to secure agreement across the board.
Present and former Irish officials, such as Paddy Teahon and Dermot Gallagher, David Donoghue, Martin Mansergh, Fergus Finlay and Sean O hUiginn all played crucial roles.
Ambassador O hUiginn must have yearned to be in Belfast on Friday to see the end of a process which had engaged him in various capacities for the best part of 20 years.
It was a sweet moment too for British officials like John Holmes, Jonathan Powell, Quentin Thomas, Jonathan Stevens and the now-retired Sir John Chilcott.
With so much focus on the Taoiseach and Prime Minister, it would be easy to overlook the commitment of Mo Mowlam and David Andrews.
People like David Ervine, Gusty Spence, Gary McMichael and David Adams were grappling with highly sophisticated judgments before much of unionism decided there was a job that could be done.
Lord Alderdice played an important part last week in helping settle the crunch issues concerning the Assembly and its relationship with the North-South Council.
The sense is growing of the pivotal role played by Seamus Mallon since 1994 - taking out the necessary insurance for the SDLP at a time when many were distrustful of the Hume-Adams dialogue; leading his party through the long haul of negotiations; and nurturing along the way a relationship with the Ulster Unionists rooted in their trust in his determination that consent was essential to any deal.
For John Hume, Friday's agreement was a moment of unquestioned personal triumph. On January 13th, 1990 he had spelt out, in an interview in The Irish Times, his vision of an agreement spanning the "three sets of relationships", copper-fastened by an act of self-determination by the people of Ireland, North and South, voting in separate but concurrent referendums.
But if Hume carried the vision, it was, in the end, the courage of David Trimble and Gerry Adams which made reality of it. Both men have taken the ultimate risks for peace. And on Saturday, both must face parties shell-shocked by the scale of the compromises they are now asked to endorse.
David Trimble has confounded the doubters and the sceptics. He has maybe even shocked himself. He has proved to be a moderniser - and in a way which those who proclaimed him such after his election to the leadership could never have imagined (and almost certainly never intended).
For it is now clear that, somewhere along the road of a strategic engagement, the Ulster Unionist leader came to accept that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were serious about bringing the conflict to an end, and would be prepared to buy in to a settlement falling far short of declared republican goals.
The proof is in the welter of concessions Mr Trimble, and his deputy, John Taylor, have made. Having borne the brunt of the IRA campaign, and regarding the peace process as the ultimate refinement of the "armalite and ballot box" strategy, many unionists will find the proposals for policing reform and prisoner releases a bitter pill to swallow.
The still-strong integrationist tendency sees little attraction in a partnership Assembly which depends for its survival on full commitment to the North-South Council with its array of implementation bodies. But the ultimate horror for many of Mr Trimble's colleagues - and the issue which could ultimately bring him down - is the prospect of Sinn Fein members sitting around the cabinet table at Stormont.
The same issue could pose a major problem for Mr Adams. If the SDLP has had to overcome its historical aversion to devolution, this is a mountain of a very different order for republicans to climb.
The Sinn Fein president must persuade his followers that the Assembly must be seen in the context of the North-South arrangements; and that together with internal reforms, the justice and equality agenda, and the inclusive nature of all the new institutional structures, the agreement represents a significant advance on the status quo.
But just as Mr Trimble cannot deny that the Union has been redefined, so Mr Adams will be unable to deny that the agreement explicitly establishes the principle of consent for constitutional change in the North; that the territorial claim is gone; and that the price of participation must be an evolving but inescapable commitment to exclusively peaceful means.
As Mo Mowlam has always said, each side needs to claim ownership of the agreement. But to Mr Trimble and Mr Adams falls the extraordinarily difficult task of selling their achievements (which are many) while not denying the ground they have had to give.
Both sides have made a good start this weekend, acknowledging there is much in the document that disappoints while seeking to give it a fair wind. For David Trimble and, one suspects, for Gerry Adams now, there is no other choice.
On Friday night, as he began his selling job, the Sinn Fein president said - of Stormont, and of the days of injustice and second-class citizenship - there could be no going back. He must have been acutely aware of the truth of this in the personal as well as the political context.
Mr Trimble, likewise, has staked his all on this. His task is to persuade unionism that, whatever fate it might inflict upon him, there really is no going back.
For even if it were to fail the coming electoral tests, Friday's agreement has transformed the political landscape and defined the territory to which, sooner or later, they would have to return.