So farewell then to Craigavon Borough Council, famed in song, story and legend. How much duller the local papers will be, deprived of their fortnightly foray into the beating heart of parish pump democracy.
Where now can our elected representatives go to decide if the park really is Protestant or Catholic?
Will anyone ever argue again that swimming on a Sunday makes Jesus cry?
Is there time, before the axe falls, for one last debate on the Reformation?
Most of all we need to know the final score in the tribal contest that has dominated all our lives.
Who won, in the end?
Portadown or Lurgan?
Since time immemorial spade-town has been the ying to our yang, the Tayto to our Golden Wonder, the Shelbyville to our Springfield. This is what makes the demise of Craigavon Borough Council particularly relevant to the Review of Public Administration.
When Portadown and Lurgan were amalgamated into the new city of Craigavon in 1973, there was a strong sense that 'natural' constituencies had been sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.
To this day there are people who will tell you that neither town ever truly recovered. But for those of us born since then the unified council has undeniably created a new natural constituency, with a new sense of identity encompassing the whole of Craigavon.
Even the endless fighting between Portadown, Lurgan and the city centre over roads, shops and amenities became part of a shared experience that has bound all three districts together.
Today Craigavon is approaching physical completion, with housing developments and retail sheds fast-filling the central void. How much the council had to do with this is open to question but it has certainly been years since that council felt like an artificial imposition.
Will the new southern 'super-council' achieve similar acceptance on a larger scale? It seems unlikely.
Craigavon may not have begun life with a single sense of place but that was always the clear intention. The huge footprint of the new super-council's territory covers no obvious common ground.
People do have a vague allegiance to their county, outside Belfast, but the proposed area takes in much of Down as well as the whole of Armagh. It also comprises four existing councils with wildly differing local government cultures, most already familiar to us in Craigavon through the complaints of friends and relatives.
Armagh City Council is snooty and expensive, obsessing over its tourism white elephants to the detriment of outlying villages.
Banbridge District Council is worthy and dull but still prone to spectacular acts of incompetence.
Newry City Council is ambitious, successful, smug and parochial, perversely proud of its royal charter and God-given place at the centre of the universe.
All four existing councils essentially represent one large regional town plus its hinterland – and those towns and their hinterlands are fixed geographical facts.
Even if the area was not so enormous, the forces which drew Portadown and Lurgan together under one authority are simply not present within the super-council boundary. Nobody is proposing a new city incorporating Newry and Armagh, or a new centre of industry between Armagh and Banbridge.
Ironically, several unique characteristics of the overall super-council district have also fallen victim to the Review of Public Administration.
Craigavon and Banbridge will lose their delayed-selection school system, for example, while Armagh will lose the education board that managed it.
Typically, reaction to the proposed new councils has focused on constitutional concerns and specifically the fear of a republican repartition conspiracy.
This is misplaced paranoia.
Sinn Féin is Europe's most successful party of protest but on every occasion when it has been obliged to exercise real power it has turned out to be just as useless as all the rest of them.
Now that a further demonstration has been arranged, support for the Shinners could hit a brick wall unless they change their ways – so either way, everyone wins.
Meaningful responsibility allied to statutory power-sharing requirements should also put manners on the DUP.
But how much will any of this mean to us, as voters, if local government ceases to be local? Will a councillor representing 5,000 people in a chamber of 50 councillors representing a quarter of a million people still be the person we call about a vandalised bus stop, a broken street light or a dead cow in the river?
Nobody ever wanted Craigavon Borough Council and few ever sang its praises. But I think I'm actually going to miss it.
