Let it never again be said that sport is trivial, that the simple act of racing to see who is fastest or chasing balls around a pitch is fundamentally unimportant to human existence.
eep down, of course, many of us suspect this to be true, but every so often a moment comes along that allows us, as a nation, to embrace the grand delusion.
Where were we? At home – where else could we be?
Whether you stayed up or got up, rode the roller-coaster live or watched it back in the morning, this was an event that couldn’t but ignite emotion in even the most stone-faced of sporting sceptics, a signal to us and the world of all that is great about the Irish.
In many ways, Fintan McCarthy and Paul O’Donovan don’t embody our traditional traits: the desire to be an underdog, the suspicion, bordering on an inferiority complex, that there is someone better. This pair, who grew up a few kilometres from each other in villages outside Skibbereen, know deep down there’s no one better.
They think it and they race like it; self-assured that when the German boat pulled ahead of them yesterday, they possessed a trump card their rivals didn’t.
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And yet, once the race was done, the medal won, you realised very quickly they were unmistakably, unashamedly Irish. The first thing O’Donovan said to McCarthy after they crossed the line?
“Savage.”
As they stood before us in the mixed zone under a blazing Tokyo sun, we asked whether they were ready for how their lives were about to change.
The idea seemed almost offensive to O’Donovan, the thought of developing notions, a concept that wouldn’t fly back in Skibbereen.
“They’ll knock me back down to earth quick enough if I do get carried away,” he said, laughing. “Life goes on all the same, you still have the same friends and do the same things in life. It’s not the be all and end all.”
O’Donovan knows this more than most.
The 27-year-old has already experienced the catapult to fame that now awaits McCarthy, and he knows it’s a fleeting, unsatisfactory ideal towards which he could aspire.
As a medical student, he has also spent enough time in hospitals in recent years to not place too much weight on the result of a boat race or to try to extract some deep meaning from it all.
Yet if sport has one potent characteristic, it is how it gives us licence to discard our sense of reason.
The country has had more than enough misery heaped on it over the past 16 months, and there’s no point in pretending that sporting success will solve what issues remain.
But what it does, what sport has the endless capacity to do, is to make us forget, however briefly, about issues elsewhere.
This week it allowed us to bask in the glow emanating from some of the nation’s finest sons and daughters.
From the women’s four of Aifric Keogh, Eimear Lambe, Fiona Murtagh and Emily Hegarty and their brilliant bronze on Wednesday to the golden duo of O’Donovan and McCarthy, the ecstatic smiles beaming back from Tokyo reminded everyone of all that is good about sport, of all that is good about the Irish – of all that is great about life.