It was always going to be hard to choreograph acceptance by Gerry Adams of Ian Paisley's surrender; likewise to deliver to Ian Paisley the visible decommissioning the IRA denied to David Trimble. The transaction was bound to be traumatic on both sides, but it has been the logical goal from the moment Sinn Féin and the DUP emerged at the top of their respective leagues.
These two draw immense loyalty from their supporters and distaste from everyone else. Their co-operation, if it happens, will never be a pretty picture. But it has every chance of providing a stable, devolved administration: if Shinners and Paisleyites do the deal, who shall stand against them?
Authoritarian organisations are never likeable. But, in the past week, Northern phone-in programmes have heard a procession of grassroots DUP supporters struggling to explain what their leader might be doing, audibly baffled but without the slightest inclination to criticise.
The sequence which puts the IRA out to grass will also visibly and verifiably decommission the last pretence of anti-agreement sentiment. The Paisley party has been inside the agreement structures from the start, while professing to be intent on its destruction. Now they stand ready to head the executive and work the North/South body.
No matter how loud the claim to the contrary, that surely looks more like the agreement vanquishing them than them vanquishing the agreement. Put like that, it sounds like humiliation. But it is only possible to humiliate those who feel shame, and neither DUP supporters nor republicans would be what they are if they blushed. If the IRA makes good its undertaking to go out of business, it will do it with a flourish, probably brazen.
Just as Ian Paisley came off the phone from George Bush to tell his Ballymena flock that a demobbed IRA must parade in sackcloth and ashes, before plodding out of Number 10 to deliver a remarkable line. "I would like to think we would have a quiet province. I would like to think that the man people said was a man of war was a man of peace." When has he ever before shown anything but contempt for what "people said" about him?
It may have been play-acting. There has always been a question over how much of his own bombast he believes. One of the lesser fascinations of the moment has been the sight of a Paisley apparently restored by the magic of the spotlight, diminished by illness and age but with much of the old presence and a respectable degree of the old eloquence.
It was tempting to hear in his "I would like to think" the dawning of a desire for the world's approval and a fond epitaph, tempting to think this a glimpse of the force for good he could always have been. At the very least, it must have been a concern to sound reasonable, like much of his and his party's public utterances recently, which in turn argues that they know their people are content to hear their leaders negotiating at last.
Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness at the head of a new executive; the IRA conclusively out of business by its own public proclamation; a Sinn Féin undertaking to sign up to the Police Service and a DUP commitment to sign up to power-sharing: the package is hard to absorb, even without the prospect of devolved control of policing and justice within a definable period of time in the hands of two ministers, one from each of the two parties.
It is only a little more plausible with the explanation that Sinn Féin would move towards joining the Policing Board just as fast, and no faster, than the speed with which the British government moved towards devolving the relevant powers.
But then who imagined that this would ever be plain sailing? Who imagined the combination of Paisley and McGuinness? Perhaps even Peter Robinson failed to see that coming, until the leader's clout with his people made him the essential focus of the television cameras.
"First Minister" has such a ring. "We made a mistake in the negotiations maybe, calling them First and Deputy First Ministers instead of Joint First Ministers," says a now-retired player. "The idea was not to rub unionists' noses in it. But the posts were meant to be equal."
The deal will come around again if it falters this time on a demand of Old Testament stringency - the mightiest ego of them all may in the end be the cornerstone of the revised agreement, not the rock that smashes it.
Sinn Féin, who have another jurisdiction to conquer, can probably live with the second-best title. Paisley at the last needs to be first.