Today, rather than Good Friday, or even May 22nd, 1998, may be the closest we have come to a defining moment in the affairs of the this island. The events of the past couple of weeks, culminating in the acceptance of the ruling council of the Ulster Unionist Party that the power-sharing process should recommence on the terms currently on the table, means more than the avoidance of another obstacle on the way forward.
It amounts to unionism voting away its own veto and surrendering its right to rule by a majority of its own numbers. Before, there had been no evidence of any true change in the mind-set of unionism, so what appeared to be breakthroughs were actually illusions. Unionism, even those elements perceived as moderate, was always seeking to create impossible obstacles and ineluctable traps for republicanism, with a view to ensuring that nothing fundamental would change.
This strategy was clouded over by pseudo-moralistic cant about paramilitary violence, and protected by the covering fire of anti-republican elements in both Britain and the Republic, the resilience of various hatreds - not excluding self-hatred - being sufficient to obscure the true nature of the problem.
It was not so much that unionists desired to exclude nationalists from power, as that they wished nationalists to accept a second-class place in any future arrangements. A close study of the events of the past few weeks will reveal the true sensibility of rejectionist unionism, which is not so much spooked by the threat of IRA violence as terrified that the absence of such violence may force unionism to abide by its own rhetoric.
The great fear of unionism all along was not the bloodbath threatened by its cheerleaders North and South, but that the threat of peace would expose its own moral redundancy. Unionism, until now, has been a supremacist, racist outlook, acquiring meaning and identity only by virtue of its desire to deny the humanity of people residing in the North of Ireland who happened to be Catholic and/or nationalist.
It is important to restate that this attitude preceded republican violence. Unionists, in their "modern" incarnation, like to pretend that any reluctance on their part is due to the Armalite-and-ballot-box strategy of republicanism, but there would have been no call for Armalites if unionism had been capable of comprehending the rudiments of democracy in the first place.
For example, it became clear within a short time of the referendums of May 1998 that many unionists regarded the votes of nationalists - North or South - as irrelevant. The only majority which mattered was a majority of unionism, and even this was open to interpretation; unionists who did not agree with the rejectionist view were not really unionists at all. Bizarrely, at least by the standards of the outside world, the rejectionists managed to combine this position with a pretence that there was some connection between unionism and democracy, bleating on and on that "democrats" could not be seen to capitulate to the demands of a "private army".
Everything which happened before last Saturday was as a consequence of the supremacy of this mind-set, and this created a deep ambiguity around the conduct of David Trimble. The question was, had Mr Trimble genuinely stepped outside the perimeter of unionist sinn feinism or was he just pretending to in order to collapse the process and relieve unionism of pressure to live up to its own rhetoric?
It was even possible that the split in the UUP was a partly unconscious attempt to have it both ways - to pretend a desire to move forward while holding on to the pseudo-moralistic ground where it felt safe.
Thus unionism could accrue brownie points by appearing to seek an accommodation with nationalism, while seeking only to push republicans into a well-sprung trap. Until Saturday, that ambiguity remained. Now, there cannot be many remaining doubts about Trimble's sincerity.
In the face of a barrage of last-minute last-ditch attempts to hold on to the supremacist position, to load on new preconditions designed to maintain a state of inertia, David Trimble at last emerged, however reluctantly, as the De Klerk of Northern Ireland politics, finally turning up for his long-postponed appointment with reality.
His dismissal of Jeffrey Donaldson's "alternative" said it all: they had tried it before, but they had to accept that this process was not just about serving the desires of unionism - there were other parties requiring satisfaction as well.
Of course it could be observed that this kind of rhetoric is integral to the Good Friday package, which has languished now for two years. But maybe those two years have been necessary for intelligent unionism to explore all possible means of escape, to try out all the permutations of objection and procrastination, before finally bowing to the inevitable.
One of the most sobering aspects of the past fortnight for unionists used to being bailed out from the Republic must have been the silence of the hitherto vocal neo-unionist cheerleaders south of the Border. Mr Bruton and Mr Quinn were nowhere to be seen, and some of those newspapers which in the past could be relied upon to stick to the anti-Provo line actually published editorials making, of all things, demands on unionism. And not a flying pig in sight.
Of course, one should never underestimate the unionist genius for negativity and inertia. In the chess-like nature of the peace process, it may well be that unionists have simply agreed to make this next lurch forward because they know it will shift the onus back on to republicans to make the next move. With this caveat recorded, it may be time to welcome a sizeable section of Northern unionism to the family of democracy.