Luck, they say, is always infatuated with efficiency. On Saturday in our grey, angular old stadium, luck and efficiency danced the tango before us. The more efficient Ireland were, the luckier they got, which is to say that luck, in the end had nought to do with this fiesta.

Mick McCarthy, denied by his harsher critics the right to claim that he has been unlucky on previous expeditions, has thus earned the right to demonstrate that game plan and courage and conviction earned this moment. His triumph is more piquant for coming against our old friends the Dutch, who know nothing of such ephemera as luck and superstition. They came to execute. They failed to execute. In their bone-dry analyses of Saturday's game they were more generous to Mick McCarthy than many of us have been.

Ah, this was some kind of wonderful and afternoon of noise and colour and unlikely deeds, a landmark day in the evolution of a team, an afternoon when the old rule about no cheering in the press box took a hell of a pounding. There wasn't a media backside left in contact with it's media seating when Jason McAteer scored. We disgraced ourselves deliriously.

I blame Mick McCarthy, of course.

McCarthy sent out a team which after an early spell of jitters dictated the rhythm and style of Saturday's game. He sent out a team shredded of top personnel but transfused with his own passion and belief. He sent out a team which in its construction demonstrated his own courage and principles, his own qualities both personal and footballing. He sent out a team which when reduced to 10 men, not all of whom even get a game at their own clubs, beat one of the finest sides in the world. He gambled big and the pay-off was all the sweeter because he had staked his own beliefs and character.

For all that he's been through in terms of sour defeats and personalised criticism, for all his loyalty and passion, it was a thrilling, eye-welling moment, to see him caper in triumph on home turf. He risked a lot taking this job, not just his sanity but the bond he once had with Irish football supporters. It could all have ended in tears except that a couple of times men in FAI blazers took him aside and told him he was doing a good job and they wanted him to stay. They were right.

It has been a tough time. He didn't win one of his first seven games. By the time he'd had his 10th game in charge Keith O'Neill had scored four times for him and David Connolly twice. He could have been forgiven for thinking that he had discovered a new cutting edge. Most of us thought so too. Yet the process of replacing old rusty studs like Townsend, Houghton, Cascarino, McLoughlin, McGrath, Irwin, Aldridge and others would inevitably be more painful and more difficult than that. And yet, during rebuilding work McCarthy set a standard, getting the team to play-offs we had little right to be in only to find himself derided for losing them.

Last week Mick McCarthy did everything perfectly. He retains his loathing for the media - but nobody is perfect and it's a common enough flaw in football men.

This is his time. And let's not chip away at the moment by pretending that this generation of Dutch footballers had not got greatness in them. Enough of that fork-tongued revisionist faff. I was lucky enough to watch them all through France '98 when they were sublime. They were semi-finalists then and semi-finalists in Euro 2000. Had they qualified for next summer's big dance they would have been at least that again.

Permitted to play football as they were against England at White Hart Lane recently the Dutch can destroy teams, creating movements that make you weep. This was a good and unified Dutch team run by the smartest manager of his generation. They came to Dublin and lost to 10 men, and a second-string defence and a very fine manager.

For Holland it was an X Files sort of day. Patrick Kluivert, who had scored 16 goals in the last 20 internationals, was hustled into ordinariness. In the end he was beating himself against Richard Dunne like a wave breaking on a boulder. Ruud van Nistelrooy diminished as the game grew. One imagined Louis van Gaal calling home saying, "honey I shrunk the strikers".

And others. Jaap Stam was unnerved. Marc Overmars lost his way in the frenzy. The new boys from Eindhoven, Kevin Hofland and Mark van Bommell, wore the haunted looks of kids who might never be the same again. Nobody had told them there would be days like these. And van Gaal? He just panicked.

Meanwhile, Ireland found their beat. After Ireland lost to Macedonia during his first campaign, McCarthy noted the problems of getting a young team to behave like an international team. That day in Skopje his own players seemed cowed by Roy Keane's reputation. The back four would pass the ball to Roy as a pavlovian response to finding themselves in possession. Nobody on the field apart from Keane did any talking, let alone shouting. That has been somewhat of a problem ever since.

On Saturday, though, Keane found his appetite matched by those around him. Matt Holland's cheekiness. Damien Duff's endless runs. Steve Staunton's organisation of the defence. The team has grown up around Keane. They aren't his equals in the footballing sense but on Saturday at last they had learned how to impose their personalities on a game. Roy did less barking than he has done at any time during the campaign.

He, too, got the reward he has long deserved. He said quietly afterwards that it was for the fans. If so it was an afternoon of mutual present giving.

At this point you have to believe that Ireland will be sending a team into the play-offs who have been unbeaten in 15 games, and will be coming out of the play-offs as a team unbeaten in 17 games. You have to believe that next summer will be a giddy circus, that credit unions will be looted irresponsibly, that publicans will get sinfully rich, that work will not get done and holidays will get stretched and that football will be all that matters.

In other words after an era of Celtic Tiger greed we'll experience a return to traditional values.

Give thanks.