Frank McNally watched the homecoming on television
The Irish World Cup journey ended as it began, with an FAI official attempting to clarify the confusion surrounding Roy Keane.
No sooner had the team stepped onto the tarmac at Dublin Airport than the association's general secretary was explaining to RTÉ that comments he made before leaving Seoul had been "misinterpreted". He had not meant to draw a line under Keane's international career, he said.
That would be a matter for Mick McCarthy.
But even as the nation prepared to feast the heroes of Japan and Korea, the ghost of Roy continued to haunt the banquet. Asked how he had enjoyed the flight, goalkeeper Shay Given noted that the team had been "up in business class, so we were very comfortable".
He might have missed the real action, but here was one result for which the former captain could claim credit.
Even in business class, however, the 11-hour flight had taken its toll.
Reacting to the shock defeat of Italy, Niall Quinn remarked that "North Korea would have been brilliant" as Ireland's quarter-final opponents. Brilliant indeed, but only in a parallel universe - a 38th parallel universe - in which the North Koreans had first qualified. This has been a World Cup of shocks, and in yet another twist, it failed to rain on the homecoming party. The weather had been the obvious weakness in the Phoenix Park line-up, but it held up even better than the Irish central defence, and as the evening progressed, the crowd in the park swelled accordingly.
The swelling was not as serious as Sky News diagnosed - its 7 p.m. headlines had the team welcomed by "a million" - but it was sufficient for RTÉ's Jim Sherwin to estimate 100,000 and rising. "I haven't counted them all," he added, modestly. RTÉ's man at the airport, Colm Murray, announced that the proposal to helicopter the team to the park had been thwarted by the fact that Áras an Uachtaráin was a no-fly zone. In Colm's disconcerting phrase, the plan to fly the players had been "scuttled" - an example of an air travel metaphor hitting an iceberg.
But the players made it eventually, wearing the team's third-choice strip of suit-and-tie, for a meeting with the President, the Taoiseach and the North's Deputy First Minister, Mark Durkan. As with the Koreans, only one of the Irelands had qualified for the World Cup, but both were represented at the homecoming party.
Out in the 15 Acres, the presentation of the team was preceded by a brief performance from Westlife. In fact, when the boyband departed after only one song, studio anchorman Bill O'Herlihy appeared to be reliving some of the trauma of another star's early departure from the World Cup stage. "That was very disappointing," he said.
But in a tournament of upsets, Bill provided one of his own when Johnny Giles reminisced about his only visit to the Áras as a footballer, at the invitation of then president Paddy Hillery. "Paddy was a smashing man," declared Bill. Then, in yet another example of the expert panel having to revise its opinions, he added: "Is a smashing man."