IN an ideal world Northern Ireland (or the north, or whatever moniker you prefer to attach to this place) should be waking up after Brexit to an economically animalistic future.
It should be roaring like a lion. Tigerish, like the Celtic (or Asian) version. Stampeding towards a potentially prosperous next generation. Purring even.
Yet the barking, roaring and meowing of those who refuse to entertain anything with even the slightest whiff of constitutional surrender or concession to a near neighbour is, in effect, caging that business animal.
I'll probably have retired, exasperated, from my role in this most esteemed publication before we know for sure whether any Brexit deal is good, bad or ugly.
But if we're serious about creating, building and safeguarding this region's economic wellbeing in the years (decades even) ahead, we need to understand what was actually on the table in that (now probably obsolete) 585-page tome.
For if the trading arrangements envisaged in the draft agreement were embraced it might, just might, have put Northern Ireland in a singularly unique economic nirvana.
The region had effectively been offered unfettered access to both British and EU markets. And, in case you'd forgotten, it has also had the powers divested to set its own rate of corporation tax (dependent, of course, on the restoration of power-sharing institutions). Anyone for 10 per cent here versus the Republic's 12.5 per cent?
Put together, Northern Ireland could have become a future (albeit light) version of Singapore, which has one of the world's most business-friendly regulatory environments for entrepreneurs and which has rapidly developed from a low-income low-value country to a an economic exemplar.
Imagine that for just one second. A highly developed free-market, open and pro-business economy, appetising for major foreign direct investment, and with a highly attractive tax regime and articulate pool of graduate talent.
Yet for some, the Brexit deal as it stands leaves too much of a constitutionally unpalatable taste in the mouth to put money in people's pockets.
Unionists see the paper Theresa May and her team pored over for months as offering only politically uncertainty and having a destabilising effect, potentially leading to a constitutional crisis. Really?
The global opportunities which might have existed for this place, and its chance to garner and preserve an international reputation for innovation and entrepreneurship, have now been removed from the table.
Sammy Wilson has already compared the Brexit deal to "a punishment beating". He later claimed Northern Ireland has been "put on a platter in an abject surrender to the EU".
Admittedly the complexity of the withdrawal negotiations increased materially once the EU accepted the principle of a UK-wide backstop to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland instead of a simple backstop.
But even if the Prime Minister did renege on some of her commitments around regulatory divergence for the north, the deal as it stood would have meant seismic positive changes for the economy here.
For some dyed-in-the-wool unionists though, what do jobs, livelihoods and prosperity really matter when there's another constitutional 'crisis' to bellow about?