Athlete and audience melding into one ecstatic, unrestrainable entity at moments of special and eternal accomplishment.

The kind of vital emotional oxygen Nphet and the Irish government continue to regard as suspicious contraband.

Here is the aspect that makes the outcome of a football match, or the conclusion of a golf tournament seem less a cheery diversion than a fully-fledged religious experience.

A sense that those with a ringside seat are witnessing something that will live beyond all their days, an impression that, for as long as the alchemy continues, they will hold the keys to the heavens.

And it is born, this glorious, life-affirming adrenalin rush, of a shared delirious experience between participant and public, a merging of competitor and crowd into one joyful tidal wave.

Denmark’s Monday night rising above the nine-day-old image of a stricken Eriksen in a hallway between life and death was gripping, touching and gorgeous.

The evening’s beautiful essence was located not in the cold accomplishment of victory over Russia – hugely impressive though that was - that secured a place in the tournament’s knockout stages.

What set the occasion apart was the emotion unleashed by the stark contrast between this happy Monday and the terror which convulsed Denmark a week earlier.

The communal release simply could not have unspooled at an empty, Covid-haunted arena.

But at a Parken Stadium overflowing with humanity and elation, a cathartic coming together was enabled.

When Ericksen fell, the Danish players and supporters stared down a highway of tragedy; yet their star player survived, he is recovering, and the energy derived from that knowledge coursed through the stadium on Monday.

At the end there was an outpouring of tears, relief and love, a heartsoar of identity, that marked, for this observer, 2021’s most touching sporting episode.

A mid-summer miracle.

Rahm’s thrilling birdie-birdie finish to seal his first Major, his invoking of Seve, the gassed-up, body language that was reminiscent of Tiger at his peak, had electrified our screens as Sunday slipped into Monday morning.

It was golf as rock concert, with the Spaniard as the gyrating, hypnotic lead vocalist.

Again, what carried it to another sensory frontier was the sonic boom and blinding colour, the thunder of acclamation, the recognition that something priceless was unfolding by the glistening Pacific waters.

It was as if the audience reaction was propelling Rahm toward an unforgettable crescendo.

The player feeding off the gallery, the audience pumped-up by a fire lit by the superstar performer.

Rahm was an uncontainable volcano, erupting with delirium, first on 17 and again on 18, as putts for the ages curled and swooped and disappeared to deliver the victory this charismatic star was born to achieve.

Both moments were made possible by the athlete but made special by the presence and reaction of a live audience.

The energy from a thronged amphitheatre is the psychic fuel that propels sport to the stars.

Across the world, crowds are coming back, a vaccinated planet recognising the redemptive power of allowing people to gather to worship again in numbers at these athletic temples.

Not only outdoor, where science tells us the risk of infection is tiny, but at indoor events from the NBA playoffs to World Snooker Championships, we have seen the shutters come up with no noticeable spike in case numbers.

Here, our great national celebration of Irishness, the GAA Championships, commence this week.

But on Saturday and Sunday, Semple Stadium, Markievicz Park, Fitzgerald Stadium, Aughrim, Pairc Tailteann, O’Connor Park and others will echo only to the sound of tumbleweed and silence.

Of course, the GAA, as an impotent passenger on the hyper-cautious, impossibly slow-moving Nphet train, are handcuffed and blameless.

As with antigen testing, Ireland is increasingly an outlier when it comes to a common-sense approach to removing long-bolted padlocks from turnstiles and permitting a little light back into lives.

There were 23,644 at the 38,000 capacity Parken Stadium on Monday, although visually and aurally, it had the feel of a coliseum bursting at the seams.

The mental charge it gave to Denmark’s people is unquantifiable, though the uplift was clearly evident in the shining faces of those massed in the stands.

Here, just a handful will be permitted at towering Semple Stadium when Clare and Waterford come to Thurles for Sunday’s opening 2021 Munster hurling chapter.

You can recognise the dangers of Covid, acknowledge the requirement for caution and still sum this up in a single word: Madness.

It feels for all the world like a missed opportunity to inject a little optimism into society’s veins.

Some 3.25million vaccinations have been issued in Ireland; the vulnerable and the elderly are protected. Semple Stadium is a gaping, outdoor space, a cathedral of fresh air open to the skies.

At the very least could a crowd of 12,000 – roughly a quarter of Semple Stadium’s capacity – not be permitted ringside to watch the extraordinary Tony Kelly go head to head with last year’s All-Ireland finalists?

Even watching from afar, what rose up in Copenhagen and California felt like an impressive rampart being mounted against the wilderness.

An invitation to rebirth from which our leaders avert their glance.

The silence in Thurles on Sunday will tell a story of an Ireland still cowering as, elsewhere, so much of a vaccinated world chooses to live again.