AnalysisEnda Kenny says one of the high points of the election was when he took part in a Fine Gael parade in Dublin led by a samba band, and saw a street artist dressed as James Joyce jiving to the music.
It wasn't just Joyce but thousands of others who danced to the Fine Gael tune this time around.
The party is cock-a-hoop over the spectacular recovery in its fortunes and refuses to dismiss the prospect of leading the next government, although the conventional wisdom has Fianna Fáil very much in the driving seat.
Fine Gael went into battle with 32 seats and came back with 51. Party sources point out that this was a greater gain than even Dick Spring made with the Labour Party, which won an extra 18 seats in 1992. Fianna Fáil increased its total by 16 seats in the 1977 landslide, and Garret FitzGerald won 22 new seats for Fine Gael in 1981, at a time when the Dáil was increased from 148 to 166 members.
The Fine Gael story is a classic tale of turning defeat into victory. Instead of lying down and patiently awaiting extinction after the 2002 debacle, the party took Frank Sinatra's advice to "pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again".
A report by backroom guru Frank Flannery after the 2002 meltdown highlighted the need for strong leadership. Moreover, it suggested the appointment of a political director for policy co-ordination in Leinster House, along with a director of communications to get the Fine Gael message out.
A party on its last legs was remodelled into an efficient fighting machine. Shortly after taking over as leader, Kenny embarked on a series of rallies around the State, where he sought to restore the morale of a damaged party organisation.
The first fruits of his labours were seen in the 2004 local and European elections. Fine Gael came in with only nine fewer council seats than Fianna Fáil and also emerged with the largest number of MEPs among the Irish contingent at Strasbourg.
The party faithful could now see that the 2002 results were an aberration rather than a harbinger of terminal decline.
In addition, rookie candidates such as Leo Varadkar, Terence Flanagan and Lucinda Creighton had successful outings on the hustings, preparing them for the bigger contest three years later.
With the likes of Carlow-Kilkenny TD Phil Hogan as director of organisation, Gerry Naughton as political director, Ciarán Conlon as director of communications and Flannery as director of elections, Kenny had a strong team around him going into the latest campaign.
General election candidates were selected on the basis of work rate at local level, likely appeal to voters, and, above all perhaps, eagerness to succeed.
A good example of this hunger was Dublin Central candidate Paschal Donohoe who, within minutes of the Taoiseach's surprise trip to Áras an Uachtaráin, sent out a text to the media to announce that his people were putting up posters in the area. Donohoe didn't make it in the end but coming fifth in a four-seater was a significant achievement.
Fine Gael was putting forward a fresh image when Labour was being taunted by its enemies as an over-ripe party in the last-chance saloon.
With Kenny bounding around from one constituency to the next, there seemed to be a deliberate strategy of protecting him from probing daily interrogation at the hands of hard-faced hacks in the national media.
Fine Gael sources strongly deny this was the case, pointing out that he was constantly available at various stopping points along his campaign tour.
"It was never really the intention to keep him away from the more hard-nosed journalists," says a party insider, adding for good measure that Fianna Fáil was "quite secretive" about the movements of Bertie Ahern.
Fine Gael had done its homework on policy, and identified health, crime and education as key areas. Special attention was paid to the needs of families, particularly in the commuter belt.
If Kenny fails to become taoiseach he will have to submit to a re-election process at the hands of the parliamentary party, but he is showing no signs of stepping down. If anything, his enthusiasm seems greater than ever.
There are some regrets that, for instance, health spokesman Liam Twomey failed to make it, although that seat in Wexford is still held by Fine Gael in the person of Michael D'Arcy.
It is a puzzle that Mairéad McGuinness MEP ran in Louth, which was always going to be a major challenge, rather than in Kildare South, where she would probably have had a better chance.
Napoleon said that morale was three times more important than physical capacity and resources, and it was Kenny's achievement that he restored a defeated organisation's self-belief or, as one Fine Gael activist put it: "The party is happy in itself under Enda."