After two-and-a-half years, dozens of community meetings and the presentation of a proposal longer than the longest Harry Potter book, Sidewalk Labs made it official last week: the company — a corporate sibling to Google — is calling it quits. Their proposal for Toronto’s waterfront is gone.

But the waterfront isn’t.

I know what you’re thinking: duh. But it’s worth pointing out that the demise of Sidewalk’s effort is not the end of Toronto’s dream of having a great waterfront. Whatever your opinion was on the particulars of the Sidewalk plan, everyone should acknowledge that a partnership with a global technology conglomerate is not a necessary component of realizing a waterfront development strategy. There’s no guidebook to lakeside development that starts with “step 1: email Google.”

The opportunity is still massive, and still achievable. Quayside, the core of the Sidewalk plan at the foot of Parliament Street, remains a prime 12-acre piece of land next to developments that have managed to move forward without the controversy of the Sidewalk plan. Give it a bit of time and Waterfront Toronto should not have a lot of trouble finding a replacement plan. But the real prize, as Sidewalk often pointed out in their planning documents, is a bit further east: the Port Lands. There, the total land, including developable area, existing greenspace and current industrial uses, totals about 880 acres.

To put that in context, that’s the same amount of land as an area spanning from Bathurst Street to Parliament Street, and Queens Quay to Dundas Street. It’s another potential downtown, within walking distance of Toronto’s current downtown.

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