LINCOLN, Neb. — The nearly decade-long battle over Keystone XL has come to symbolize much more than what the disputed pipeline would actually be: a subterranean tube, 36 inches in diameter, carrying crude oil from Canada to Nebraska.

So when state regulators here said Monday that the project could proceed, their decision was initially seen as a hard-won validation for President Trump and the American laborer, and lamented as a grave threat to pristine farmland and the groundwater below.

But while Monday had been expected to provide a clear and final answer on Keystone XL’s future, it may have only created more uncertainty. The regulators in Nebraska rejected the pipeline company’s preferred route, approving the project only on an alternate path. TransCanada, the pipeline company, later issued a short statement that did not say whether it would move forward with construction, leaving people on both sides of the issue unsure of how to react.

“They do not get their preferred route, the route that we have been fighting in courts over for eight years,” Jane Kleeb, the longtime leader of Nebraska’s anti-pipeline efforts, said of TransCanada. “What is wrong — and what we will continue to fight — is that this pipeline is still on the table.”