At 1 a.m. on Ash Wednesday in the old stable-block of Hillsborough Castle, the sense of a peace process drawn out beyond endurance took physical shape for a second or two in the British Prime Minister's unmissable exhaustion. Blair is a trouper; above all, however, he is a stylish and energetic performer, writes Fionnuala O'Connor.
As he came in on the end of Bertie Ahern's final remarks to close the proceedings, the tired face warmed and the grey voice brightened. This was Blair the evangelist for peace, fired with the conviction that makes him a disturbing advocate of war in Iraq, here proclaiming what few in Northern Ireland doubt but rarely communicate in public: that we have come a long way already and will continue to make progress, however interrupted.
The outcome of Hillsborough may be inconclusive, but Blair, as often before, voiced a cheering truth rarely highlighted convincingly by local politicians. As always, emotional literacy lifted his shopworn sales patter. The agreement had already "delivered an enormous amount". If a pause for reflection helped settle outstanding issues, "the people who will benefit are not just this generation but future generations, and we can lay to rest the Troubles that we've all grown up with, all our adult lives. That's the prize."
The stable-block press conference room was open to the night, politicians standing in the courtyard outside eavesdropping on the prime ministers. The best thing about the two-day session, Blair concluded, had been "the genuine dialogue between the parties", something impossible to achieve in the negotiations that produced the 1998 agreement.
After hours of contradictory spinning, most tired journalists probably treated the line as no more than a throwaway remark. Later, officials and participants confirmed that Blair was struck by the "engagement" that took place between Ulster Unionists, including David Trimble, and Sinn Féin. Gerry Adams tucked a reference to continuing "engagement" into his own press conference when the prime ministers left: Sinn Féin would meet Ulster Unionists again in the next few days to try to resolve issues, he said.
But while parties adjusted public positions for their own audiences and negotiations continued behind the scenes, the fact of engagement between unionists and republicans blurred again. No one in Hillsborough asked Sir Reg Empey, standing in for the missing Trimble, about the Adams remark. When the Blair-Ahern roadshow left, taking with it the reduced posse of foreign journalists still covering a too-protracted, now dull peace process, normal service resumed: a disposition in much of the population to keep discussion of the state of play at arm's length.
It is in some minds the greatest difficulty - that political arrangements imposed after negotiation between people who report back to mutually suspicious communities must then survive in an atmosphere which provides no active encouragement, no momentum. There is also an argument that in the most peaceful societies politics is and should be boring, that refusal to recognise political crises is in itself a sign of progress.
In the last hours of the Hillsborough talks a lone police van staked out the top of the village street opposite the castle, three police in semi-riot gear standing beside it with arms folded. By Tuesday night the few protesters of the first day of talks had gone. They never included the Rev Ian Paisley's DUP, once a fixture anywhere unionists talked about compromise. The days when protesters outside made it difficult to hear speakers inside already seem flashbacks from a distant past.
A now frail Mr Paisley turned up on television on Wednesday to rail, if less thunderously than of old, against postponement of the Assembly election: "Who the heck do they think they are?" Once he would have promptly and angrily answered his own question: treacherous British premier, interloper from a foreign and hostile state. But the Taoiseach is too frequently visible a player to be damned now each time he visits. It is another scarcely noticed advance that the double act of prime minister and Taoiseach, the manifestation of essential unity between London and Dublin in their joint management of Northern Ireland, long ago lost the power to provoke.
"The entire unionist community are raging mad and they'll show it in the election," Mr Paisley continued. But all unionists are not "raging mad" about the Hillsborough manoeuvres, or the workings of the agreement.
In a place like Northern Ireland, making peace was bound to be made of half-hearted shifts as well as major transformations - like that in republicanism. Those who have grown up with the Troubles, and those who grieve for the many prevented from growing up, or growing old, might well have wished for a speedier resolution. It must wait. Whole- heartedness would have been lovely, but in a society built on bitter division and scarred by so much violence and grief, it was never likely.