Andy Warhol didn't mean this, surely. Not just 15 minutes of fame but 15 minutes to define a career, to justify an obsession, to satisfy a lifetime of yearning. Sonia O'Sullivan gets 15 minutes today - 15 minutes in which to become an Olympic champion.
Fifteen minutes or less. One helter-skelter race through Stadium Australia this morning, one 5,000 metre Olympic final, one set of tactics and decisions, one race which will provide either redemption or bitter tears as the defining point of a turbulent career. The race begins at 10.55 a.m. Irish time.
You know the story - you just linger to see the cliffhanger ending. Few athletes have ever been as obsessive as Sonia. She is what she does - cannot separate herself or change that.
To watch her train is to watch a woman at work with her passion. To see her lose is tough. We've watched her for a decade now, willing her across finish lines, celebrating with her and crying with her.
Here we are at the final few pages.
Atlanta. That failure hit her like a hurricane hits a shore. Everything was swept away. She left the last Olympics, run down, without a coach, without a sliver of confidence. She went from being the battler who never saw a contest she didn't like to being a struggler who lost interest in races midway through.
It was hard to lay all the passion and hope on the line again. Rebuilding herself has been a long-term project, a triumph in itself. "I thought I'd never come back again," she said, "and I thought I'd never be able to live without coming back."
The road she has travelled: Athens in 1997 broke her heart again but in the spring and summer of 1998 she won all before her. In 1999 she gave birth to Ciara, maybe the most famous child in world athletics today.
This year she returned again. More roller-coaster stuff. Injury plagued her early in the year. She shed tears in Villamura after a bad cross-country.
Sonia pushed on. Ran her best and worst races of the summer within days of each other. Kept us guessing.
"I've done everything I could do," she said yesterday in Sydney. "There's nothing left but to run the race. There's some good runners to beat but you don't win an Olympics any other way. I'm just going to run as hard as I can. This has to be the race of my life."
On Friday, Sonia ran 15:07 to top the list of qualifiers for today's final. That time won't be nearly adequate today. She'll reckon on having to run 14:45, maybe faster, today.
It's quite some time since she has been under 15 minutes but those close to her reckon she has a 14:30 in her given the right race.
The medals for the 5,000 metres will be presented by Dr Pat Hickey, Ireland's member of the International Olympic Committee.