HANDS up, I got it wrong.

But then, as far I'm aware, so did every other political pundit, commentator and writer in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom.

Quite simply, no-one - even, whisper it, among the pointy heads at party headquarters - came close to envisaging the degree to which the SNP, having lost the referendum war, would win the post-referendum peace.

Here is how it was meant to go. Soon after September 18, Alex Salmond would announce he was stepping down. So far, so good. He didn't hang about. He did it the following day.

His deputy Nicola Sturgeon would face no serious challenge and, in all likelihood, no challenge at all to succeed him. Fine, we got that right too. But then the received wisdom began to unravel at breakneck speed. The assumption was that the SNP would be a wounded beast, feeling a bit sorry for itself and would at best enter a period of introspection and at worst embark on a blame game or civil war.

Had Mr Salmond been too timid with his "Indy Lite" vision keeping the pound, the monarchy and Nato membership? Had he walked onto a sucker punch from George Osborne over currency and blown it with his performance in the first televised debate against Alistair Darling? How would Ms Sturgeon cope with a resurgent Labour Party buoyed up by winning a No vote?

With the timetable for "The Vow" back on track and further devolution on the way, the Nationalists would be put back in their box. Membership of the party would shrink, the SNP would stumble into irrelevance at the looming General Election campaign, the energy of the Yes campaign would dissipate, the missing million would go missing again, and Scottish politics would disappear into a haar of dullness and indifference.

This view made particular sense for those in politics or journalism who were involved in the 1979 referendum for a Scottish Assembly in which a narrow vote in favour was thwarted by the 40% rule.

Mr Salmond himself wrote in The Herald of that period: "With the drumbeat of self-determination silenced, Scotland lapsed into a dark political decay of acrimony and recrimination." But the 2014 pro-independence lobby has stubbornly refused to follow that script. First, we had the emergence online of the "The 45", proud and defiant over they way they had voted and determined to keep the spirit of the Yes movement going.

Soon this translated into an entirely unexpected boom in SNP membership, from under 26,000 to 50,000 to 75,000. It now stands, one month to the day after the poll, at more than 82,000. Yes, it has reached a plateau by "only" going up by 2,000 or so in the last week, but the Labour Party would give its eye teeth for so many new members, or indeed anything to reverse the seemingly inexorable decline in its activist base.

It's not just booming membership. The latest TNS poll shows Ms Sturgeon carries into her leadership trust ratings double those of her predecessor and mentor. Mr Salmond's trust rating is double that of the Prime Minister's which, in turn, is double that of Better Together leader Alistair Darling, with the Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders at Westminster virtually dropping off the scale.

Only Gordon "The Vow" Brown, asking his own party to improve its VAT plans while trying to block the Tories on income tax, comes close in the trust rankings.

Obviously, if you ask people who they trust to take action in the future they will opt for a new, incoming leader but what a start Ms Sturgeon is making, with almost 20,000 tickets for her inaugural speaking tour being snapped up within 24 hours, including 13,000 at the SSE Hydro in Glasgow.

This is utterly unprecedented in Scottish or British politics, a level of mass public attendance not seen for generations. It is the Midlothian Campaign for the 21st Century.

There are bound to be tough times ahead from within and outwith what is in effect a new mass membership party, but Ms Sturgeon is building from a far more secure position than any of us could have predicted.