And to excuse the break-in as an act of brash folly by desperate youth seems like misguided bien-pensant paternalism. This, too, is falling into a trap.

However muddled some of the protesters’ methods may seem, their underlying purpose and principles couldn’t be clearer. There is no arguing about the heart, the spirit and the extraordinary decency of the small group who went back into LegCo to drag out the few who remained or the many more who stayed outside the building to act as a buffer against the police.

Something similar goes for that large segment of the broader public that has mobilized against the extradition bill, the Lam administration and creeping encroachment by the Chinese government. My sense, based on conversations, anecdotal evidence and intuition, is that solidarity prevails within this movement despite any disagreements, however deep, over tactics.

Even people who frown on the siege of LegCo aren’t suddenly going to support extradition to mainland China or start trusting the Hong Kong government. And plenty seem to respect the courage of those they think were foolhardy to break in. Some say they cried watching footage of the last-ditch rescue party, with its interview of a young woman who describes, sobbing, how scared she is that the police will arrive — and how much more scared still she would be for anyone left behind.

Since the early days of the 2014 Umbrella Movement I haven’t known how to think about, much less describe, the force that drives the surges of contestation in Hong Kong. Protesters today are demanding, among other things, that Ms. Lam resign. But they know that she is unlikely to and that if she does, it won’t change anything. That’s too lucid a position to be called naïveté, and too defiant to be called defeatism.

Whatever this combination is, though, it can be as powerful as it is mind-bending and moving. The extradition bill was suspended, after all, in the face of mass marches. True, it wasn’t withdrawn, and there is a difference between those two things. But there is an even bigger difference between the bill’s being suspended and its having passed.

The stakes and the dangers feel far greater today than they did in 2014; self-sacrifice is in the air. One of the last protesters in the council chamber, a young father, told a reporter he would stay until the end; his own father had escaped China, wounded, during the Cultural Revolution, he explained, and now he was defending Hong Kong for his children. Another took off his mask before declaring the movement’s core demands.