ALLIANCE won the day and Naomi Long voiced it, with sense enough to hail the boost for newer parties and use it niftily.
She will need to work on her own people on the right to choose, for example, and maybe on her own remaining conservatism, to keep up with what she recognises as "a progressive movement in Northern Ireland".
She might also be too optimistic in saying the "politics of fear, of 'vote for us or you'll get them' - that has broken".
But optimism has kept Alliance going, like Colum Eastwood's reshuffled SDLP with its bright new faces.
In the campaign already revving up, the skilled and combative Long herself is now a player to watch.
As one sharp onlooker put it: "Eastwood should probably be worrying that Naomi is now on a roll."
But the notion of Eastwood Number One for Europe had surely hardly alighted, though stranger things have happened.
On the street near the BBC, a big poster of Sinn Féin's dug-in MEP Martina Anderson was backdrop to the entrails-picking-over of the councils election.
Local government here is a limited exercise, and it may be bogus to vote representatives into a Europe the UK is struggling to leave.
Neither of those is the point. Voting is the sharpest and only way to bring politicians up short and force rethinking on stubborn machines.
For DUP and Sinn Féin both a mood is there to be seized, whatever they choose to take from it.
New Green Belfast councillor Mal O'Hara caught the ear, and the mood of the moment, when he told BBC NI that writer and campaigner Arundhati Roy says you hear a new world coming in whispers.
Literary quotes tend not to work well in the mouths of politicians but this sounded unforced and easy.
In small but now doubled numbers, the Greens and People Before Profit have arrived like spring, perhaps this time a sturdy season.
As many members of the Collins family in the City Hall as Ulster Unionists - that said it all.
People Before Profit brothers Matt and Michael alongside the two UUs remaining from a once all-mighty party, smug and clinging to its titles and robes and archaic procedures, are symbol and reality combined.
The articulacy and passion of PBP's Fiona Ferguson and O'Hara has added impact on air because they clearly share aims, think alike, and - hey - see the point of working together.
The Collins brothers, like west Belfast pioneer Gerry Carroll, defied the Sinn Féin steamroller.
Whatever the main preoccupations this time, they overrode the crude Sinn Féin message last time that PBP was pro-Brexit, end of story. It hasn't been the end.
Whatever cost five Sinn Féin council seats in Derry and Strabane this time will take some fixing.
On the doorsteps, was it fretting over universal credit and personal independence payment that Sinn Féin heard, get you back to Stormont and save us?
The bunch of politicians headed for Stormont this very day for sandwiches with Karen Bradley may be fed to the eyeballs already with voter wisdom, indignation, and puzzlement too.
Having to hush is a tough proposition while the permanently bamboozled Bradley pumps patronising blether at them about what the people of Northern Ireland want.
Sinn Féin sound like they are mostly of a mind to deal again.
The DUP sound nowhere near that, a dilemma for Sinn Féin multiplied and magnified to the nth degree because not long ago they had a deal ready to roll which Arlene Foster up-ended, disowned and flatly asserted had never existed.
Barney Rowan and Eamonn Mallie printed paperwork to scupper that fib.
Did Sinn Féin voters last Thursday explicitly say, 'Ah never mind Arlene and her fibs, she's a busted flush, do the best you can'?
That idea has holes in it. And yet, there was Mary Lou McDonald, Arlene's real opposite number, composed and sure of herself at the City Hall count, declaiming that the electorate had "shown the stalemate at Stormont is unacceptable".
The absence of Stormont, Raymond McCartney in Derry confirmed, was indeed an issue on the doorsteps.
You could see and hear disgruntlement. The McCartney style is still heavy going, his past burdensome as well as being his armour.
The defter John O'Dowd managed "we will learn the lesson" with a sideways, implicit scoop-up for his team of the newly-strengthened progressives who put "equality at the centre of local government and the future of the executive".
So it goes, though Sinn Féin have never played nicely with other parties.
But on with the show.
