And so the slowest of slow-motion car crashes reached its inevitable end.
The arrival on Thursday of the ACT Integrity Commission's long-awaited report from its investigation into a primary school upgrade ended the wait for the most hotly anticipated documents in the Legislative Assembly.
Every hypothesis on what has been to come in the place for the past three years has come with the caveat: it depends on Operation Kingfisher.
The implications had long since ceased to be about a northside primary school getting bigger and whether a union's preferred contractor got the work, at a higher cost to taxpayers, important as those questions were.
With long-serving deputy chief minister Yvette Berry's former chief of staff in the frame, there were political implications.
Ms Berry's resignation from cabinet on Thursday afternoon played out in the way it was long expected.
The insider's tip had been the report would clear Ms Berry of any wrongdoing herself, but corruption on the part of her former chief of staff would precipitate her imminent political demise.
So it was, almost three years on from the Integrity Commission's public hearings that found a general, hard-to-shake whiff of wrongdoing but seemed never to quite locate a smoking gun.
Labor's political foes, frenemies and ostensible friends all took turns declaring that for Ms Berry, in traditional Labor parlance, it's time.
Given numbers are the only the real currency in politics, the stakes were clear: a censure motion in June showed Ms Berry would not survive a no-confidence motion.
Chief Minister Andrew Barr would have then been next in line for a no-confidence motion, for not taking action against the minister, and his government would have ceased to be.
Thus Ms Berry's cabinet career ended with a statement at 3.15pm. Mr Barr was left to face the cameras, with a downcast tone and a public apology for the behaviour of those found to have been corrupt. Ms Berry will stick the term out on the backbench.
There was no other way. Mr Barr made it clear more than a decade ago when Joy Burch resigned as police minister that ministers had to take responsibility for the actions of their staff.
On the question of why Ms Berry will stay in parliament when it would surely be cleaner to disappear into the West Belconnen sunset, a glance at the potential countback result in her Ginninderra seat offers a factional explanation.
Heidi Prowse, who looks to be next in line if Ms Berry called time as an MLA, is factionally unaligned. Ms Berry's time on the backbench will mean the Left do not lose a reliable vote in caucus.
Mr Barr now needs to reassemble his cabinet. He has arguably the best chance in a long time to effect renewal, but must also deal with the messy business of the second-in-command in his government being taken out by a corruption scandal.
Polling this week showed Labor remained in a strong position but the word "corruption" anywhere near "ACT Labor" and "the CFMEU" will be a fresh test for the government and a new set of opportunities for anyone trying to replace them.
Labor's caucus will meet on Monday. The Left faction's Rachel Stephen-Smith is now the obvious choice for deputy. The Right's Chris Steel has been caught up in too many spots of bother (think the $78 million HR system upgrade debacle and the abysmal roll-out of the new public transport ticketing system, MyWay+, which earned him a censure in the Legislative Assembly last year).
In Mr Barr's press conference, talk turned to his own political future.
"These are matters, obviously, that I and my colleagues will need to consider. No one is irreplaceable in politics, no chief ministership is forever, no stint in parliament is forever. There must be periods of transition and change," he said.
After a very long build up, ACT Labor now enters such a period. It might be the last chance Mr Barr has to reliably shape what comes after his time in parliament.
And Ms Stephen-Smith, currently representing ACT Labor at the party's national conference in Adelaide, now gets a clear chance to take pole position, with Ms Berry, a long-time factional rival, out of the way.
It's just as many have been predicting. The predictions of what will follow now? Far more varied and not nearly as reliable.
