Relief is at hand and sanity will soon be restored. By the time most of the population is tucked up in bed tomorrow night, it will all be over for another four years.
And in the meantime, those for whom the past month has been a tsunami of hype and nonsense can slump back into the more familiar TV diet of Coronation Street, Fair City, 24, Lost, Prime Time and the Nine O'Clock News, command the button and exercise a diversity in their choice of TV.
For a fair number of people, this will be an approximate reaction to the ending of the World Cup. The tournament comes to a climax tomorrow evening in the final game between France and Italy. This evening, third and fourth places will be decided when Portugal, put to the sword by the elegant and majestic combination of Frenchmen Thierry Henry and Zinedine Zidane, meet the hosts Germany. Many fans of the game will be rooting for the Germans - they deserve an honourable third place as much for their sportsmanship and determination shown on the pitch as for the good-spirited welcome shown to the tens of thousands of fans who descended on the country from almost every continent and who (mostly) behaved themselves.
No sport energises a mass, global public response to quite the same extent as football. Individual nations have their own favourite national sports - baseball and American football in the United States, cricket in Pakistan, Gaelic football and hurling closer to home - but international soccer apparently ignites an enthusiasm on a global scale the way only the GAA summer championship does on this small island. As much as this delights football supporters, it mystifies those for whom the game remains an incomprehensible clash between 22 grown men who really ought to have something better to do with themselves.
Madam is told that such a perspective fails to grasp what is going on. There is a profound human need to bestow loyalty - on family and friends most of all, but also on community, town, county and nation. Sport allows this to occur without, save in exceptional instances, the death and destruction associated with war. The World Cup is unrivalled in providing a theatre in which national teams as contrasting as Togo, Japan, Tunisia, Argentina and Switzerland come together and, with their supporters, do battle as though their lives depended on the outcome.
But tomorrow it's all over and RTÉ's excellent panel and après-match team will take a well deserved break. What a pity that the Irish team at the World Cup came from The Irish Times!