A good day, said Mo Mowlam. A great day, enthused David Andrews. A big day, certainly. Right up there with the Downing Street Declaration, the first IRA ceasefire, the loyalist cessations.
Days like yesterday are savoured in Northern Ireland. It offered hope and there's been a terrible deficiency of that commodity over Christmas and the new year.
Nobody's getting carried away, of course. There are enough loyalist and republican splinter groups and dissidents ready, able and oh-so willing to try to blow this current chance for a political settlement to pieces.
The British-Irish blueprint for an agreement is modest in size but big in ambition. It's like a Sunningdale Mark II but, seemingly, with a better chance of success.
Now, almost 3,000 deaths on from the last Sunningdale, politicians are to try for a reprise.
The last death at the time of writing was that of Terry Enright, a good man who was chiefly green in his love of nature and of Black Mountain which overlooks Belfast, and which with his father he had campaigned to save from destruction.
He was a true cross-community campaigner, equally respected by the likes of Billy Hutchinson and David Ervine. In what appears to have been the direct intention of the Loyalist Volunteer Force, he was murdered while working as a doorman at a nightclub owned by Mr Ervine's sister-in-law.
Terry Enright figured in dispatches at Stormont yesterday. Gerry Adams, his uncle-in-law, left the talks early to be with his family, looking glum and despondent.
During the talks, politicians from all the parties sympathised with the Enright family and the others bereaved by recent killings.
Reg Empey, one of the Ulster Unionist Party's senior negotiators, offered his condolences, adding that he was "expressing sympathy to some people here who were especially touched by events of recent days".
Mr Empey's reference to David Ervine, and to Gerry Adams in particular, prompted one of the loyalist politicians to turn to Martin McGuinness and say: "Did you hear that?"
Mr McGuinness said he did and Sinn Fein acknowledged the sympathy.
In a normal society that was a small gesture but in the violent context of Northern Ireland, and of Mr Adams's associations, it was significant - maybe even a positive portent.
But nobody's getting carried away. No fear of that. The document outlined yesterday poses real difficulties for Sinn Fein and for the UUP and other parties. All sides engaged in the Battle of the Spin yesterday, highlighting references in the document that were favourable to their position, downplaying those that vexed them.
Can Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness sell the deal to their people? Do they want to? Will republican dissidents try to wreck this opportunity? Can David Trimble satisfy his own truculent backbenchers and keep Ian Paisley and Bob McCartney off his back?
Those were big questions on a big day. The coming weeks and the will and determination of the politicians will provide the answer as to whether, as David Andrews said, they can accept an agreement which offers all sides "parity of comfort and parity of discomfort".
