GOLF: Since it happened, ever since that putt fell smack-bang into the middle of a white tin cup, every waking moment, and every sleeping one, too, has drawn him back to the 18th green at The Belfry. "I don't want a reality check," insists Paul McGinley. "It's not every week you win the Ryder Cup."

Which, of course, is what the Dubliner - and the rest of Europe's team - did in the heart of the English countryside on Sunday last. It was no dream.

No matter how much you want it to, however, time doesn't stand still; and, this week, McGinley can be found some hundreds of miles further north, along the famous eastern coastline of Scotland where the game of golf put down its roots and spread around the globe.

Somehow, it seems appropriate that McGinley - and eight other members of the winning European team - have been drawn back to golf's founding place, even if €5 million in prizemoney in the Dunhill Links championship is perhaps a greater lure than that fact that this is where the sport developed.

McGinley, born and bred in a team culture, and a noted Gaelic footballer before a knee injury cut short that career and forced him to concentrate on golf, reiterated yesterday that the glory should not be his, it should be the team's.

"I didn't win the Ryder Cup," he insisted, "the team won. If I'd done my job a little better, like Phillip Price, and won out the course, then the glory would belong to someone else.

"I feel like I cheated a little bit. I was fortunate that I had the glory of holing the putt, but it was such a team event and I don't want anyone to lose sight of the fact it really was a team effort."

Not that he is turning his back on the glory. Last season, he finished eighth in the Order of Merit and third in greens in regulation in booking his place on the Ryder Cup team. But he won only once, and putting was considered his frailty. How ironic then that he should use the putter to etch his name into the history books.

"All the lip outs I'd suffered in the past just disappeared in that one moment," he claimed. "What a time to hit the best putt of your life."

Ever since, he has been reminded of it. The bellboy in the hotel. The people on the course at Carnoustie, where he played a practice round yesterday. Everyone, it seems, was watching. He has stepped, as Sam Torrance put it, from the shadows.

On Tuesday night, he met up with Torrance for a couple of drinks in The Jigger, a small pub that nestles beside the Old Course Hotel, and they recalled the moment. As if that weren't enough, there were also five messages on his mobile phone from the captain. Torrance, tired and emotional, has decided to withdraw from the Dunhill, which starts today.

Neither McGinley nor the rest of the team intend to let Torrance forget, however. In fact, McGinley has orchestrated a special gesture on behalf of the European team to Torrance, the captain and inspiration. He has arranged that the ball be mounted in silver and engraved - by Dublin jeweller Ray Roche, a friend - and presented as a permanent reminder of the moment which came at 4.54 p.m. last Sunday evening, the moment the Ryder Cup was won.

"You might have seen JP (his caddie, JP Fitzgerald) reach into the hole and retrieve the ball," said McGinley, "and I would love to keep it myself. But I feel it would be better to present it to Sam."

The putt, all 11 feet of it, keeps coming back to him, however. In last year's Benson & Hedges International, also at The Belfry, McGinley had the exact same putt. On Sunday, his caddie reminded him of that.

"Four or five times he said to me, 'Paul, you know this putt. It's a ball outside the left'. And I did know it. All I had to do was to stick to my routine, not to try to see something that wasn't there. I was very focused and motivated to hole it. The fear of missing was just as high as the adrenalin rush of holing it."

When he set the putt on its way, he didn't look up until it was just a foot-and-a-half from the hole. "It was heading for the middle of the hole," said McGinley.

The resultant release of emotion - which prompted his new nickname of The Penguin - was, he said, "like when a champagne bottle explodes. I know it was only a matter of one or two seconds, but I felt like I was dancing on the green for 10 minutes before somebody came."

Yesterday, with the smile that has stubbornly refused to leave his face since the putt was holed, he looked like a Ryder Cup hero. He had a Celtic cap on his head - they'd no TaylorMade ones in the trailer - and a spring in his step that was nothing like a penguin's waddle.

"I'm on a high, and I just don't want to come down," he said.

Playing St Andrews, Carnoustie and Kingsbarns over the next three days may force him to do so, whether he likes it or not.