Not quite glad, confident morning.
To be sure, a historic day and a historic week beckon for the people of Northern Ireland and of this island as a whole. The momentous decision of the Ulster Unionist Council provides the potential to finally make good the promise of the Good Friday accord.
David Trimble and his fellow ministers, in concert with the British and Irish governments, will assuredly work flat out to generate the momentum and sense of grand purpose necessary to turn promise into reality. However, there is still no certainty of outcome.
That note will jar with those leading the celebrants, as politicians and people embark on a great adventure. As it will be. By close of play tonight, David Trimble will lead Northern Ireland's first local administration in a quarter of a century.
Amid the splendour of the partitionist parliament, those who for 30 years have upheld and defended the IRA's "armed struggle" will watch their nominees enter the government of a disputed territory until recently depicted as "a failed political entity".
Martin McGuinness may not care for the description but he will, in constitutional terms at least, become a "Minister of the Crown", for the 1998 Act establishing the Assembly makes it plain that executive authority remains vested in Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth 11.
He will be joined by Mr Peter Robinson and Mr Nigel Dodds. The two Democratic Unionist nominees will insist to high heaven that they will never sit down alongside Mr McGuinness and Ms Bairbre de Brun at the cabinet table.
But, barring a last-minute reversal of their declared policy, these two "ministers in opposition" will tonight bear their share of responsibility for government in Northern Ireland, answerable both to the collectively responsible Assembly.
On Thursday in Dublin, Irish and British ministers will sign the protocols bringing the British-Irish Agreement into force. The Anglo-Irish Agreement and Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution will be consigned to history. On the same day, as powers are formally transferred to Belfast, the President, Mrs McAleese, will have lunch with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace.
Within a week, the inaugural meeting of the North-South ministerial council will be held in Armagh. And seven days later members of the power-sharing executive will join British and Irish ministers, and the leaders of the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly, for the first session of the British-Irish council in London.
Each of these stirring and hugely important events, played out in full view of the cameras, will mark determined steps toward a new era of constitutional innovation with the potential to change, for ever, all relationships within and between these islands.
But back to that jarring doubt. Will the potential be realised?
There are doubtless those in London and Dublin who share the irritability of some in Mr Trimble's circle with journalists who persist with anything remotely "off message", even if it is only to state and record the blindingly obvious.
For all the deserved congratulation on Saturday's outcome, and the hopes now riding with him, the bottom line to be drawn from the events in the Waterfront Hall is that Mr Trimble awarded himself a stay of execution.
Even as he prepares for government, the Ulster Unionist leader knows that the sentence has not been lifted, and the thought must send shivers down his spine. For the fact is that his political life now lies in the hands of the Provisional IRA.
Ministers and officials in both capitals will probably regard this as too literal an interpretation. Certainly, they will be hoping that the events of the coming weeks will generate further confidence on all sides, helping to bring an altogether different Realpolitik into play.
They have to hope, and events may indeed prove them right. There will be no shortage of positive forces at work in the coming two months. But there you have it: the painful, nagging doubt attending the highest hopes, the present reality, that Mr Trimble did not win his party's backing for the devolution/decommissioning deal concluded with Sinn Fein in the Mitchell review.
Mr Gerry Adams and Mr McGuinness have been shouting it from the rooftops. Sticklers both for the letter of any agreement they make, there is no cause to doubt them. The facts are there before us. The delegates to the Ulster Unionist Council, just 58 per cent of them to be precise, bought the Trimble package, and not the package agreed by their leader and Mr Adams under the chairmanship of Senator Mitchell.
To put it in the crudest terms, the UUC decided at the last to trust Mr Trimble while refusing to trust Mr Adams. Almost certainly, it was the increasingly certain knowledge that they would not do so which obliged Mr Trimble to play his ace card and introduce the double-lock.
It seems pretty clear that we can discount Mr John Taylor's claim to have won vital, last-minute assurances from the Secretary of State.
Unionists on both sides certainly appeared pretty unimpressed with that. Other sources, too, centrally involved in the process, think it inconceivable that Mr Mandelson's letters of comfort can have broken significant new ground.
No, what clinched it for Mr Trimble was the promise that the council would reconvene in February and the assurance that the post-dated letters of resignation were already in the possession of the party president, Mr Josias Cunningham, to take immediate effect if the IRA fails to deliver a start to decommissioning by the end of January.
Even with that double-lock, Mr Trimble could carry only 58 per cent of his party. Without it, he was clearly headed for defeat.
That is the reality. And even as they lauded Mr Trimble's courage and leadership on Saturday, British and Irish sources acknowledged the difficulties to come. In their private view it is all too painfully clear, time-specific, up in lights and in Sinn Fein's face. Once again, they had misjudged the temper of unionism and overestimated Mr Trimble's ability to deliver.
The unionist "precondition" has been recast. No longer the prerequisite for Sinn Fein's entry into government, decommissioning is Mr Trimble's condition for government continuing beyond the end of January. Small wonder they are not yet dancing in the streets.