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Magnus Gardham Political Editor
The conference just ended will enter the collective Nationalist folk memory as the one which ended three decades of opposition to Nato.
The party leaves Perth proud of how it handled such a potentially divisive issue.
While those opposed to the policy switch, who said Nato membership was incompatible with the SNP's anti-nuclear stance, came just 29 votes from embarrassing the party leadership.
A generation of activists who joined the party in the 1970s and early 80s, motivated mainly by their opposition to Trident, will be dismayed.
But in the end, those who argued that embracing Nato was critical to the party's hopes of achieving a Yes vote in 2014 prevailed – and that was the real significance of this conference.
Galvanised by the Edinburgh Agreement, ministers, MSPs and delegates were focused entirely on the vote now certain in two years' time.
It was reflected in the First Minister's keynote address, an at-times wobbly balancing act between tub-thumping Nationalism and a reassuring independence-lite vision of Scotland's future for the benefit of the waverers whose votes will be crucial.
Alex Salmond presented independence as a "process" rather than a "single event", a kind of devo supermax.
His merciless mockery of the "Lord Snooties" of the Tory-led Government grabbed the headlines but it was his more thorough and much lengthier demolition of Scottish Labour's move to review the affordability and fairness of popular universal entitlements, such as free prescriptions, that points the way ahead.
For the new pragmatic, hard-headed SNP independence is no longer about freedom, not in public at least. It's about nudging devolution along a bit.
Had the conference ended on that note party strategists would have headed home 100% happy.
It nearly did. But even as the stands and stalls at Perth Concert Hall were being unbolted and packed away, Nicola Sturgeon used her closing speech to assert the Government's right to disregard the advice of the Electoral Commission on key referendum rules.
The row over that will rage until public opinion becomes clear. Rigging the referendum or creating a level playing field? You decide.
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