Being able to move on from the psycho-political drama of this past year should be reason enough to celebrate, but this is also the time to think long and hard about where we are actually heading. Party politics will change in the city. The impasse on constitutional reform for the past five years has proved to be draining, drawing our social capital, while other issues - like ageing, pollution and income disparity, just to name a few - continue to simmer.
No matter how much and how beautifully our politicians sing the praises of democracy, it will not solve these problems. What democracy can do, however, is force politicians to think about the viable solutions to these problems.
The Democratic Party, with its still-fragile communication channel to the central government, will need to find new areas for engagement. Engagement without appeasement and senseless Beijing-bashing will be more effective in resolving long-standing conflicts. It will take time, and will require room for trial and error.
We will also need to look at - and have the moral courage to punish - what we have allowed some politicians to get away with in recent debates.
Making a joke about a person's illness, like insults and threats, is nothing new in Hong Kong. But where, previously, we have shied away from drawing a line, we must now put our foot down unless we want to end up with a democracy that is illiberal and vulgar - where common decency and basic respect are replaced by verbal lynching and ridicule.
While we may not be surprised by the vulgar insults flung by the so-called 'role models' in the League of Social Democrats, we should no longer tolerate them. 'Long Hair' Leung Kwok-hung, protesting outside the Democratic Party headquarters last Monday, shouted (in the heat of the moment, he later claimed): 'Szeto Wah, has the cancer got into your brain?' There is no question over whether the insult was distasteful (it absolutely was); it was also unlawful. Disagreeing with Szeto, a veteran democrat who has been diagnosed with cancer, does not give anyone the right to vilify or ridicule him on the basis of his illness. Doing so would be in breach of the Disability Discrimination Ordinance, which considers having cancer a disability.