It all started on a wave of enthusiasm. The stadium would be an inspiring vision for the 21st century. Public and private funding would make it viable. Costs would be kept under rigorous control.
And then one day its backers had to face reality. The project was just too ambitious. The big plans for a new Wembley Stadium were simply not feasible.
This happened last month in London, a metropolitan area with twice the population of the Republic. Though backed by the British government and by one of the wealthiest sporting organisations in the world, the English FA, the whole grandiose project simply didn't make sense.
In spite of everyone's best intentions, the projected costs were spinning out of control. Before a sod was turned they had gone from £334 million to £660 million. While failure was embarrassing, ploughing on regardless would have been an unmitigated fiasco.
Bertie Ahern and Charlie McCreevy are made of sterner stuff. To them every obstacle in the way of Campus and Stadium Ireland is just another of those misfortunes that makes the last-minute comeback all the more glorious.
After having to correct the Dail record on costings for the project, after causing serious tensions within the Coalition over their determination to buy off every major sporting organisation with public money, and after this week's revelation of Department of Finance concerns, they may be losing the game going into injury time.
But since the whole thing is a laddish fantasy anyway, why shouldn't Bertie Sheringham and Charlie Solsjker come off the bench and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat?
As he said last month, Bertie Ahern wants the Abbotstown sports complex, and not a functioning health service or an end to poverty, to be the enduring legacy of this time of prosperity. With his eye on history, he seems incapable of looking closely at the costs, or of listening to reason. As he also said recently, the people who write critically on the subject in the newspapers know nothing about sport.
Never mind that they include most of the country's best sports journalists. Never mind that, when it comes to costing the biggest single infrastructure project in the history of the State, being able to name the Nottingham Forest team that won the European Cup in 1980 isn't much use. This is a matter of faith. Bertie believes in his Bowl, the way a fan believes that his team will win the cup next year. Evidence doesn't come into it.
If it did, the internal Department of Finance memo suggesting an overrun of at least £100 million on the £550 million the Government has committed to the project would be seen as a very mild warning. Any honest calculation places the real cost at well over £1 billion.
There's £550 million for the campus and stadium; £200 million to move and rebuild the State laboratories that now occupy the Abbotstown site; £40 million at a very conservative estimate for the transport infrastructure that includes a metro link from Dublin Airport and the city centre, an upgrading of the Maynooth rail line and work on the M50 motorway; at least £250 million in grants to the GAA, the FAI and the IRFU to entice them into the stadium; the value of the land itself, and of the recently upgraded laboratory buildings that will be demolished, which probably totals around £200 million.
This makes for a real cost of about £1.25 billion, even before building-cost inflation is taken into account. Given that in the case of Wembley projected costs almost doubled while the work was being planned, this is no small consideration.
What's especially alarming is the extent to which even the apparently predictable elements of the costings turn out to be very hard to pin down. Take the 80,000-seater stadium. The 1999 Price Waterhouse feasibility study, A Stadium for the New Century, puts its cost at £144 million. On October 17th, the Taoiseach told the Dail that "the cost for the stadium element of this project was, and still is, £281 million." And the Department of Finance memo obtained by RTE this week puts it at £323 million.
It is not perhaps surprising that even the Taoiseach and Paddy Teahon, who chairs Stadium and Campus Ireland Development Ltd, have trouble remembering the figures. Bertie Ahern admitted that the £281 million figure he gave the Dail in October was a mistake.
Writing in The Irish Times last January, Mr Teahon admitted that the mistake was actually his. "When I appeared before the Joint Committee on Tourism, Sport and Recreation, I mistakenly used the figure of £281 million as the cost of the stadium, when the correct figure was and remains £230 million," he said.
So we now in fact have four different figures from official sources for the stadium alone: £144 million, £230 million, £281 million and £323 million.
Given that he regards the £500,000 which, by his estimate, the full project will cost as "actually a modest investment", none of this may worry the Taoiseach. Paddy Teahon, for his part, has an answer for those who point to the massive ancillary costs of the project.
The transport infrastructure, he told Morning Ireland, is made up "projects that the Government has already decided will go ahead". The State labs, some of which have just been refurbished at a cost of at least £4 million, "were going to have to be upgraded anyway". The massive inducements to the GAA, the FAI and the IRFU are funds which they would have got anyway because they do good work.
None of this is even vaguely convincing to anyone who has watched the frantic political manoeuvring around the funds for the GAA or who wonders why, if the Abbotstown area was always going to get a metro to Dublin Airport, Dustin the Turkey's 1997 general election promise of the DART to Dingle isn't also in the plans.
But since when did fans caught up in the glory see any connection between the evidence before their eyes and the deep conviction that a historic triumph is just around the corner?
fotoole@irish-times.ie
