Did you leap out of the chair and roar or did you slip into the kitchen and cry? Were you whispering silent prayers or was your fist clenched and pumping as she came down the straight? This was the sweetest medal in our sporting history, a triumph, a redemption song, a perfect aria delivered by our greatest ever athlete, the one we've been through the most with and known the longest. Sonia O'Sullivan, happy and brilliant again. Could you have been Irish and been unmoved?
She said afterwards it wasn't the hardest race she has ever run. Maybe so but it was the bravest. Yesterday Sonia O'Sullivan claimed the Olympic moment she deserved in a race which compressed the agonies of the last few years into 12 and a half laps.
She came off the track and her face was shining and happy. She'd found a part of herself again.
This Olympic 5000-metre final was one of the great races, an epic struggle to the finish line between two great rivals who won't like each other any better this morning but who respect each other a whole lot more. Gabriela Szabo of Romania did what we thought she couldn't do. She held off Sonia in a sprint. This is what sport is about. This is what you came for. Afterwards you saw her stand in a little knot of love with her partner Nick and her daughter Ciara and the distance from Atlanta seemed incalculable. "That was nightmare," she said, "this was a dream."
Gete Wami, the third-placed finisher, explained afterwards that the Ethiopians had planned to run as a team and "then just before the race we decided it was wrong, not the fair thing to do". For her grace, Wami was rewarded with bronze.
And for Sonia, silver. Fate owed her this at least. She'd wanted it all so badly that it almost destroyed her back in 1996. She crumbled in front of us all.
"On the fourth lap, I felt like I was dropping off. It wasn't the pace, I don't know what it was. I was nearly gone. It was that voice in your head `do you want to go with this?' "
She did. She did. She survived by hanging on to Jo Pavey from Britain for a while and then getting between two Kenyans. "Then I discovered I was so close to winning. I came off the bend. I was so shocked I almost stopped. I'm glad I didn't."
And so she lived to fight her way down the straight, an epic slugging match right to the line. She glanced up, wasted but happy and saw the race times on the scoreboard. Two thoughts: So close. How did we run so fast?
She left finally to jog off into the cool Sydney night to warm down loyal muscles, to put order on a wild day, to think about running the 10,000 metres later in the week. She had a silver medal in her pocket, the Australian sky was inky blue and the torch was still burning. Does it get any better?