The devil we know has left the building. What of the devil we don't know, the one who will take his place?
Haroon Lorgat's dramatic demise as Cricket SA (CSA) chief executive is being celebrated.
For the public, could this mean there will be no more know-it-all nothingness dispensed from on high?
For CSA staff, no more corridor snubs and lie-detector tests? For the press, no more attempts to co-opt them, bully them or have them fired?
More enemies than friends
We cannot begrudge people who say they have suffered these slings and arrows their moment in the sunset of a day that, for them, has been coming since Lorgat's appointment four years ago.
By many accounts - some of them too personal for these words - Lorgat was ego on legs. Highly effective ego, mind, able to get big things done and done with the cold competency of the accountant he is. But people like him will make more enemies than friends, and that balance will tip.
You can't piss off enough of the people enough of the time and expect to get away with it all of the time.
But whether the balance tips naturally or is tipped by a calculating hand is another matter. That brings us to the devil we don't know.
It won't surprise anyone who has read the front half of this newspaper on any given Sunday that, here on the sharp end of Africa, we aren't afraid of killing: ideas, sound governance, the environment, opposition, tolerance, debate, animals, people.
But not ambition. Lorgat, for instance, has more of this double-edged stuff than is good for him. That he has been able to channel much of it into taking cricket onward and upward is to his credit - which he claimed, and then some, in a "personal statement" of Trumpian delusion that he would regret issuing had he more modesty.
Ambition survives and prospers, no matter what. Lorgat's ambition, rocket-fuelled by his ego, has cost him his job.
We are not surprised
Or has it only helped him lose his job?
Has someone else's ambition tipped the balance, consigning to the abyss an administrator as valuable as he is flawed? Someone who wants Lorgat's job.
We would be foolish indeed to think cricket has rid itself of rampant ego and poisonous ambition by ridding itself of Lorgat. We are indeed foolish, but not that foolish: we're Africans and South Africans and we've been shot in this movie before.
We know from years of putting up with CSA that those who enter its clutches should abandon all hope of emerging as better people. It's likely that the Lorgat saga is a consequence of CSA's half-arsed implementation of the Nicholson Commission's recommendations given to them in the aftermath of that other fine mess, the bonus scandal.
And that failure to drain the swamp (thanks Donald), if you ask this reporter, was no mistake. So we are not surprised by this week's events. But we are intent on watching this space and others that some will hope are not being watched.
We will do this because it's our duty, and because it's a damned sight more interesting than much of what happens on the field. The devils are in the details...