TORIES back. Labour turmoil. Liberals decimated. Salmond roaring. The headlines of the past week have raced past in a blur of electoral history. The eager eyed politicos are already looking to 2016 and talking, naturally, about the future.

I’d rather pause, at least for 800 words. Because something amazing has happened. Last Thursday was for many people the culmination of at least three years of dedication. A whole movement, swept up in the energy of the referendum, had justice delayed – but ultimately served – for their efforts.

It was, in that term too often used as hyperbole, a democratic revolution – or at least as close to one as Scotland has experienced. While many focused in on the leaders of the respective campaigns, there was the other story, those who partied the weekend away in party campaign offices, many who would have been brought together as strangers by a shared hope of a better country.

That brings back memories. It has to. Everyone who was moved to action in these political debates has a story, a story of where they came from and how they arrived in the present day.

I remember, back in 2012, when I decided to support independence. I wrote a wee blog online, expecting it to fade into the obscurity of a digital black-hole. But within a few days I was contacted by people – interesting, hopeful, ambitious people – who wanted to change things. Being a politics student with some free time on my hands, this sounded fun.

Like the many hundreds of similar stories I have been told, those networks grew. Small groups – on islands, in villages, via online forums and in tenement flats – came together with a purpose, with hope.

This, in an apparently apathetic society, was the beginnings of a democratic wave whose importance can never be understated.

In the beginning there were websites – Bella Caledonia, NewsnetScotland and Wings Over Scotland – with space for ideas and a different outlook on the world.

Then there were essentially “DIY campaign groups” like National Collective, Women For Independence, Business For Scotland, Radical Independence, Common Weal and others, who didn’t wait for permission to make a stand.

And of course there was the infectious enthusiasm of Yes campaign groups across the country, who brought politics back to the people. In sky-dives, in hill climbs, in banner drops, in national tours of speeches, in music and theatre and film. It became the people’s politics.

With all this behind us – the strength in adversity that the referendum campaign engendered – how can anyone be surprised that Scotland has changed?

I suppose it is like a party half the country were invited to. If you were there, you understand how great it was. If you didn’t turn up, all this excitement and flux is likely to feel confusing.

You can see it in the headlines of certain newspapers and the inability of Labour, Tory and Liberal politicians to explain their respective failings in Scotland. Why – after years of endless speeches by Brown, Darling, Cameron and co – would the people desert them?

Perhaps the explanation is best found in their faith in distant leaders rather than in the process of democratic politics.

I remember a now-sacked Labour MP lecturing me on Scottish history after an independence debate (the pupils voted Yes!). He was too engrossed in recanting the stories of 1603 and 1707 to realise that we were busy rewriting the history books, disproving his theories and changing how the young people on front of him viewed politics.

It’s a simple story, really. No scandal. No turning point. Few heroes or villains. Just tens of thousands of people who became political, and in each of their own lives changed the perspectives of those around them.

If you want to make it empirical, consider that Scotland’s electoral turnout was below the UK average in 2010. Last Thursday it soared above

70 per cent.

The SNP’s victory is indebted to the story of Scotland’s democratic resurgence. In the past writers have celebrated the struggles of the Friends of the People, the Crofters Party and Land League, the Suffragettes, John Maclean and Red Clydeside’s Independent Labour Party.

Many of those stories are inspirational, but crucially many failed to achieve their full objectives. Scotland’s independence movement has just experienced something different: victory. For that reason it may yet become the only ultimate triumph of democratic radicalism in Scotland’s history.

As it’s 250 years after the birth of democratic radical Thomas Muir, there could be no better time to celebrate that legacy than last week. It wasn’t the media. It wasn’t the politicians. It wasn’t money. It was democracy and the people which turned Scotland at the General Election towards change.

As Muir said: “It is a good cause. It shall ultimately prevail. It shall finally triumph.”