Logically and inevitably - and for Mr David Trimble and many Ulster Unionists, doubtless painfully - the Patten commission yesterday led us full circle back to the Belfast Agreement.
From the outset it should always have been clear that Chris Patten would locate his commission's report in the context of the Good Friday accord which gave him his terms of reference - in the assumptions its signatories (presumably) made at that time, and on the presumption of the agreement's survival and successful implementation.
And the last governor of Hong Kong showed himself more than ready to engage with those parties - well, one party actually - which now appeared surprised that he should have discharged his side of the deal.
For there was no mistaking he had the Ulster Unionist leader in his sights when he reminded yesterday's press conference how his commission had come about.
"It is impossible to find a political solution to the problem of policing in Northern Ireland," he declared. "That is why the politicians agreed last year to pass the issue to this independent commission. Since they could not agree on the answers, we were asked to suggest a way forward. We believe that it is possible to find a policing solution to the policing problem, but only if you take the politics out of policing."
Certainly he didn't have Ian Paisley or Bob McCartney in mind when he issued the challenge to the assembled press. Ask them, he exhorted: "What on earth did they think they were signing up to? What on earth did they think we were likely to recommend when we were asked to look at issues like ethos, composition, training and structure?"
Mo Mowlam might have wished Mr Patten hadn't spelt it out quite so bluntly. However, Mr Trimble can expect to hear the implicit charge oft repeated in the days and weeks to come. As Mr McCartney predicted in this newspaper on Wednesday, another political explosion is set to rip through the heart of unionism. And many thousands of angry unionists may well answer the rallying call to "Save the RUC". But is it likely they will turn out to damn Mr Patten without turning their fire also on the man who (in the minds of many of them at least) handed the policing issue over to him?
If Mr Trimble is at all sensitive about this matter, he showed no sign of it yesterday. In first angry flush, he dismissed the Patten report as "a shoddy piece of work". Clearly he had never anticipated that the Royal title would be scrapped. Clearly it was Mr Patten, moreover, who had failed to grasp the logic of the Belfast Agreement.
In strictly Ulster Unionist terms, the logic seemed perfectly clear. Sinn Fein has accepted that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom and its members would sit in a Northern Ireland Executive - in effect becoming ministers of the crown. Fair enough to assume, then, that title and badge as symbols of allegiance to the state should no longer be thought contentious.
In the world beyond Glengall Street, of course, such logic would be readily dismissed as wholly disingenuous. For all that, there can be no doubt the Patten proposals on title and symbols present Mr Trimble with another mighty problem. There need be no doubting, either, his personal sense of the "pain" acknowledged by Chris Patten yesterday. Nor should anyone make light of the danger, painted by the UUP leader yesterday, that in their anger over these symbolic changes, unionists might well reject whatever else they consider good in the report.
One of the most telling pieces of commentary preceding yesterday's publication of the report was a television interview with the mothers of the two RUC officers murdered in Lurgan just weeks before the second IRA ceasefire. As the camera panned to the gravestone, it lingered on the engraved RUC harp and crown as one mother explained it was for this her son had died.
There, in raw and simple terms, is the truth of it: the real, intimate, enduring sense of loss and pain for those whose loved ones have served and fallen over the last 30 bloody years.
Chris Patten tried to reach out directly to this community of RUC victims. Insisting he intended no "slight" to the sacrifice and service of thousands of RUC officers, he affirmed: "We are transforming the RUC, not disbanding it." But the greatest memorial to them, he offered, was "the vision" of "a peaceful Northern Ireland with agreed institutions including an agreed police service".
Members of the commission, and British ministers, would have been concerned to hear Sir Ronnie Flanagan venture that the "pain" might be worth the preferred "gain", provided greater acceptance of the police service was indeed the result. If he is to present himself credibly as the man to carry the reform process through, they will expect Sir Ronnie to accept that making the service more acceptable to both communities should be done because it is right, and without calculation of the result.
However they will have been immensely relieved to hear Sir Ronnie echo Mr Patten's assurance: "Certainly not, this is not disbandment." His force, he said, stood ready for radical change in the context of a stable peace and a political settlement. And there was no doubt about the Chief Constable's determination to remain at the helm.
Sir Ronnie's role will be pivotal during the crucial consultation period ahead both in terms of restraining any premature rush to judgment by Dr Mowlam and ensuring that reforms proceed in a way consistent with the security assessment and for the impact of his leadership of the force in relation to the mood and disposition of the unionist political class, and the wider public beyond.
Ultimately, of course, that political class has the big choices to make - and they extend beyond the immediate policing issues raised by Patten.
Mr Patten knows to expect no quarter from Dr Paisley and Mr McCartney. Yesterday merely confirmed their darkest fears about the nature, purpose and direction of the peace process itself. They will be unremitting in their opposition to it and to Mr Trimble.
But whither Mr Trimble? Some commentators drew comfort from his relatively restrained performance yesterday, while some close to him think he has no choice but to continue to try to ride a number of horses. However nationalists, and many others, openly wonder how long he can sustain the dual role of constructive engagement and outraged opposition.
Ironically, from Mr Trimble's viewpoint, the most benign interpretation on offer yesterday came from a very shrewd nationalist observer. The biggest pain, he ventured, was still for Sinn Fein: a party which had supported the long war, now preparing to sit in a partitionist government and share responsibility for a police force drawing its very title from the polity so long denied. "It seeks to make of a failed political entity a successful one," he remarked on the process begun by the Belfast Agreement now brought full circle by Patten.
Wasn't that part of the logic which drove the Ulster Unionists, against all expectations, to buy into the Belfast Agreement, "inclusivity" principle and all? Can they really consider Sinn Fein an acceptable partner for government while resisting its inclusion on the new policing board? And if they fear (and many of them genuinely do) the "corruption" of the police service, can they long resist the challenge to see police powers devolved to the Assembly?
That was the big "prize" offered yesterday by Patten. Beyond the debate about policing, Mr Trimble must decide if he still considers the prize worth having.