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In the end, we realize life is a journey. Or maybe it's just a Journey song.

To the strains of "Don't Stop Believin' " - and then to an ominous black screen that must have had millions cursing their cable provider before the credits finally rolled in silence - "The Sopranos" faded into history.

"Is this all there is?" Tony Soprano wondered to his shrink earlier this season. Some viewers probably asked the same thing after Sunday's finale on HBO. Or maybe they phrased it more like "Are you freakin' kidding me?"

In his predictably unpredictable manner, series creator David Chase (who wrote and directed the swan song) toned down the violence and played up the mundane. Despite having a target on his back the whole episode, Tony was constantly joking. He complained about his mother to a new psychiatrist and nagged his son about household chores.

(SNITCH ALERT: We're about to spill the beans about Sunday night's series finale. So, if you didn't watch it - and how could you have waited this long? - come back and finish reading later.)

In the end, Tony outfoxed his rival, Phil Leotardo, by making a deal with the Brooklyn boss's underlings and finally putting to good use the previous Brooklyn leader's inept son, Little Carmine, as broker.

Leotardo's execution in front of his wife and grandchildren was the only violence in the episode. (And not only did he get shot, but the rear wheel of one of those ubiquitous SUVs splattered his head.)

In the series' final scene, Tony - informed he faces almost certain indictment because one of his captains, Carlo, is talking to the feds - sits in a diner, waiting for his family to arrive. He flips through the selections on the tableside jukebox - "This Magic Moment," "Magic Man," Tony Bennett, classic rock - reminding us how integral the show's soundtrack has always been.

His family members show up one by one. Doom hangs in the air amid their ordinary banter. As the Journey song blares, we see suspicious characters come and go. Daughter Meadow is the last one to arrive, and she is flustered trying to parallel park.

Meadow, seemingly in a panic, runs toward the restaurant's front door. Was she merely worried about being late? Had she just found out she's pregnant? Does she know something's about to happen in the restaurant?

As Tony looks up to see his daughter arrive and Steve Perry croons "Don't stop," the screen goes black and silent for 10 seconds. Then the credits. The music's over.

Just another family dinner and a bittersweet ending? Or did that black screen mean the shady guy who went to the men's room came out with a gun, "Godfather"-style, and Tony didn't see it coming?

Or was it the rest of us who just didn't see it coming?

The final episode played with stereotypes, big and small, as if to remind us that Chase himself never forgot that he took guff for eight years because of how he depicted his fellow Italian-Americans. The finale had us swimming in images that tripped our biases and toyed with expectations:

Phil's right-hand man Butch walks a couple of blocks while talking on the phone, hangs up and stands perplexed amid a sea of Asian faces. (Have you been to Little Italy in Manhattan lately?)

Anthony Jr. wants to study Arabic and join the war in Afghanistan. In the end, though, he takes a job as a gofer on a movie set, finally snapping out of his seasonlong slouch toward Bethlehem.

Meadow wants to fight for civil rights because of the injustices she has seen her dad and other Italian-Americans put up with.

We get TV footage of President Bush dancing in Africa.

Tony's favorite FBI agent (and our first line of defense against the terrorists) has a nagging wife, cheats on her, helps Tony track down his rival and then, when told of Phil's hit, exhorts, "Damn, we're gonna win this thing."

And the people in the restaurant in that final scene - any one of them or none of them could have popped Tony at a moment's notice: a trucker in a "USA" cap; two black kids milling about; the jittery guy at the counter. Or maybe the table full of Boy Scouts could have saved his life.

For those who wanted Tony brought down in a hail of bullets or hauled off to jail by the FBI, Chase reminded us that life is neither that messy nor that neat.

The final nine episodes of "The Sopranos" were brilliant for reminding us that Tony wasn't a nice guy, to say the least, and never would be.

He wasn't going to see the light, despite his Buddhist fever dreams and his peyote-fueled exultation to the sunrise, "I get it!" (In the finale, he stares up at the sun while raking leaves in the backyard.)

He was brutal this year. When he wasn't bashing in the teeth of a goon who dissed his daughter or mocking his own son who was descending into a suicidal stupor, Tony was just a callous bully. With his own hands he killed his chosen successor, Christopher, and then went out to Vegas to sleep with one of Christopher's girlfriends, for good measure.

But his true sociopathic pettiness was re-established in the first of the final nine episodes. Seething over a drunken brawl with brother-in-law Bobby Baccalieri, Tony got revenge by ordering Bobby to carry out his first hit, essentially sealing the man-child's doom.

That first episode this year also brought home the bitter irony inherent to the Mafia: Family is everything. Unless it's your biological family we're talking about - parents, siblings, wife, children - because those loved ones are just around for blame and recriminations.

Not that you fared any better if you were Tony's "brother," Big Pussy; his "son," Christopher; or his "father," Hesh. Not to mention the actual cousin he blew away with a shotgun in Season 5.

Series guru Chase dawdled during last year's 12-episode run-up, trying fans' patience with Tony's extended coma, the never-ending saga of gay mobster Vito and other apparent dead ends. But this year, the storytelling was economic and powerful.

One by one, Chase showed us the fate of key characters. We saw psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi questioning her years of working with Tony; Paulie vegging out to "Three's Company" or sunning himself in front of Satriale's; Johnny Sacrimoni unrepentant while he lay dying of cancer; and Christopher drug-addled and gurgling for his final breath.

Chase was telling us very clearly that it's not pretty at the end for these guys. Most of them probably would have taken a hero's bullet in the head years ago to be spared such indignities. The sudden black screen to the slow fade.

Is it a victory to be sitting in a New Jersey diner munching on onion rings and listening to classic rock?

In Sunday's penultimate scene, Tony visits Uncle Junior, who sits toothless in a state-run nursing home, staring at the birds outside his window. Nothing Tony says registers with Junior. Not the whereabouts of his stash; not that little incident where he shot his nephew. That is, until Tony utters this phrase: "This thing of ours."

Tony is reminding Junior that he and Tony's father once ran things in New Jersey.

"We did?" Junior says sweetly. "Hmm. That's nice."