CAIRO — Around 9 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 10, Cairo's Tahrir Square was seemingly one of the happiest places on the planet. The tens of thousands of people packing the square were beyond euphoric as they reveled in a sense of hard-fought communal victory. In one section of the vast public space, a group of flag-draped young men danced around in a sort of modified conga line, chanting, "Hosni's leaving tonight! Hosni's leaving tonight!"

Elsewhere, a second circle danced to a live drum as a young man sitting on someone's shoulders led them in chants of: "We're the Internet youth/We're the youth of freedom."

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A flurry of early evening developments had stoked anticipation that this would be the night that President Hosni Mubarak would finally surrender to the demands of the protesters who had occupied Tahrir since Jan. 28 and announce his immediate resignation. State television had announced that Mubarak would address the country at 10 p.m., and several respectable news outlets were reporting that he would resign. Thousands more people continued to stream into the square, determined to be in Tahrir to witness the historic moment.

I spoke with a young, veiled woman named May Gaber, a journalist who writes for Ikhwanonline, the official website of the Muslim Brotherhood. Gaber was sporting a large bandage on her face, thanks to a car accident on Thursday morning. When she heard the news reports, she left the hospital and came to Tahrir along with her mother and sister.

"I feel like we are halfway down the path. Of course it makes me very happy," she told me. "I used to be almost embarrassed to be Egyptian; now at last I am truly proud."

Mubarak's departure seemed to be such a done deal that many protesters had already moved on to a discussion of what a post-Mubarak Egypt should look like. Several people told me they automatically rejected the idea of Vice President Omar Suleiman assuming power. "We don't want Suleiman either. We want to choose our own president. That's the whole point," said Mohammed Abdel Salam, a 32-year-old small-business owner.

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