Was the Keane-McCarthy saga the end of the age of innocence, a time when we found simple joy in our soccer team, asks Kathy Sheridan
Did we lose the plot or what? Like a drunk tottering towards sobriety after a 10-day binge, we have yet to figure out what happened.
On Tuesday, when the Tricolour began to make a hesitant appearance on cars (one for each side seems to be de rigueur), emotions were still raw, raw enough for one man to observe the inoffensive little national symbols, then conclude darkly - "Bloody McCarthyites".
His wife rolled her eyes. It was day eight, for pity's sake.
She had endured the efforts to explain it in terms of classic Greek tragedy or the revival of Civil War politics or the fall-out of tortured genius or a mammoth family row. She'd had enough.
"Look," she said, "if a couple of women had a stupid spat like that, you men would be putting it down to hormones and needing a stun-gun to stop your hysterical sniggers."
Simple, eh? But that is to underestimate the sheer primeval power of football. Or something. "It's in there all the time, looking for a way out," writes Nick Hornby about his football obsession in the first line of Fever Pitch.
But daft/awe-inspiring/ mysterious as that may be to many of us, it goes nowhere near explaining what befell the nation in the past two weeks.
The loss of innocence was a big theme on the talk shows. Children were bursting into tears. Some families had remortgaged homes to get to the Far East while war had broken out in others; was Keane a spoilt pup or McCarthy too casual by half?
And overlying it all was a shroud of nostalgia, woven from that enchanted once-upon-a-time, when amid the miserable depths of recession, the Irish found a simple joy and hope in their footballing heros, a time of innocence when they simply dared to dream.
But this being 2002, at the very same time they were demanding to know where were the sports psychologists (which according to one, are two a penny in junior hurling teams)? Where were the press officers (England has six, apparently)? Where were the professional negotiators? Where was the professional infrastructure?
Are these the props of the age of innocence?
You want innocence, then leaf back to The Irish Times sports pages of May 18th, three days before the start of the saga, when Mary Hannigan wrote about "the logistical nightmare of keeping things sweet for pampered young men".
Given the ensuing fuss about missing balls, drinks and gear, there is something poignantly innocent about the FAI's Eddie Cox and his revelations of what went into the 41 containers - 650 kg in total - he had painstakingly assembled and consigned to DHL on Monday, May 13th, for delivery to Saipan and Izumo City.
Snickers, Fig Rolls, Tracker bars, "little things that definitely won't be there . . . and Gatorade, plenty of that", he said. "But they're really all just snacks, the food in Japan will be fine, there'll be no problem there. You just know the lads'll be saying 'Where's me Snickers bar?', so it's things like that you have to bring. The one thing we don't bring is their boots, they'll carry them themselves."
For Eddie, the planning had been going on since the day Ireland qualified. Will he be having a holiday when he gets back? "No, this will be my holiday." A holiday spent chasing after a pack of obscenely paid and pampered young men, making sure they had a Snickers at their elbow when the whim descended.
Is Eddie Cox from that enchanted age of innocence?
And what was the nature of this innocence exactly in which we bathed before Roy Keane swore at Mick McCarthy?
Where is the innocence in a sport that pays a player more in a week than most people earn in a year - players who still can't resist the chequebooks of the media they affect to despise, with their ghost-written columns?
Where is the innocence in the sordid commercialism of a Manchester United with its several strips a season? Or the naked sectarianism which underlies the attraction of Rangers versus Celtic?
And can anyone define the type of loyalty required to support a system and a club say, like Chelsea, which at one stage this season, was togging out just two English-born players?
A website poll for BBC Radio 4's Today programme this week found that footballers were ranked sixth for least-respected profession.
Amid the avalanche of calls, letters, comments and - famously - more hits on various Internet sites than after September 11th, just one letter has appeared in this paper about another sporting incident last week, which is the truest indicator yet of where sport is headed.
It wasn't so much that Leicester's Neil Back might have robbed Munster of the European Rugby Cup when he blatantly cheated in the scrum, it was the reaction to his cheating that should have raised the antennae of anyone who sincerely believes in the innocence and spirit of sport.
"I am quite at peace with myself," said the man himself, "I did what I had to do to ensure a win." English pundits and commentators laughed it off as "streetwise" and "crafty" - this from a nation that for 30 years has never stopped griping about Maradona's "Hand of God" goal.
The word honesty simply never came into it.
This was the week that saw FIFA, football's world governing body, re-elect Sepp Blatter as president, a man whose own secretary general has sent a 30-page dossier to Swiss police, alleging enough corruption and financial mismanagement to make our brown envelope merchants blush.
So if it wasn't about the death of innocence, what did we get so excited about? Did we see in the duel between Keane and McCarthy something of the struggle within ourselves, the one between our self-image as the coolest, merriest, most loveable of dreamers and the cold, ferocious, perfectionist mentality of winners?
Some tried to settle it for us. Leo McKinstry (a self-described Irishman), writing in the Daily Mail, has us down firmly as the former: " 'Ach don't work yourself up, sure it'll be fine, get another pint inside you' would be the response of most Irishmen to Keane's outburst."
Wrong, Leo, dead wrong. We got worked up all right. We're just not sure about what, but we're working on it.
Nor are we going to submerge ourselves in the "30 years of hurt" mentality that England has inflicted on itself over a game of football. As the Cameroon match drew nearer this week, the flags were growing more abundant and the atmosphere lighter.
At the very least, it's going to be interesting, and there are a few of us who wouldn't even have conceded that much two weeks ago.