Keith Dugganwas enthralled by the sublime Nadal v Federer Wimbledon final; exalted by Pádraig Harrington's double major coup; glued to the XXIX Olympiad; and bemused by 46-year-old Evander Holyfield's latest title tilt

DUSK HAD fallen over London when the Wimbledon men's final entered its last hour. This was July and the world was still spinning happily on its axis, the fat cat nations complacent and content. As the Big Ben clock chimed out at nine bells, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were still locked in a seemingly deathless struggle for supremacy on the fabled grass centre court.

The match had started almost five hours earlier, but for the lucky few gathered in the ground and the millions watching around the world, the afternoon formalities seemed like a lifetime ago. Rain, ever the party-crasher at Wimbledon, had delayed play, but that was the only interruption to a fascinatingly symmetrical duel - the powerful Spaniard won the first two sets, 6-4, 6-4 but then the elegant, preternaturally fast Federer fought back not just from a straight sets defeat but from whispers that he had, at 26, begun his spiritual retreat from the sport which he had mastered for the previous half decade.

In what was exquisite drama, the Swiss claimed the third and fourth sets on 7-6 tie-breaks and so the best two players in the world began a fifth set that would at first draw comparison and then arguably eclipse the storied meetings of Borg and McEnroe in the early 1980s.

Wimbledon is one of those curious sports events that retains a powerful television congregation. People who would not normally watch tennis religiously tune into Wimbledon - in part because the BBC have long been masters at producing a sporting soap opera out of the two-week tournament.

By teatime, it was apparent in millions of houses that this was not just any old Wimbledon final.

One imagines that countless Sunday roasts were either abandoned or hopelessly burnt as families were drawn into the unfolding, riveting spectacle.

Here were the two best players in the world, young men with extraordinary talent and physical grace and immense wealth. They were, of course, playing for supremacy in the world rankings and for the coveted Wimbledon title - the most prestigious of the tennis crowns (at least in the eyes of the hosts) - which Federer had made his own for five years.

But there was also the sense, as the shadows fell and then deepened on the centre court, that they were playing on because of that ancient, childlike compulsion that everybody experiences.

In the end, Nadal won a titanic final set 9-7 as the final shot was played in near darkness. But millions were gripped by a match that seemed reminiscent of two kids playing on in the street in furious joy and turning a deaf ear to their mother calling them in.

Some people believe Federer ranks among the finest athletes the world has ever seen. The emergence of Nadal gave him a worthy opponent. In 2006, among those watching that year's Wimbledon final between the pair was David Foster Wallace, the American writer and Federer devotee whose demise this autumn was widely lamented. Wallace fulfilled something of a personal ambition in attending Wimbledon and wrote of the Federer/Nadal rivalry: 'It's the passionate machismo of southern Europe versus the intricate clinical artistry of the north. Apollo and Dionysus. Scalpel and Cleaver. Righty and Southpaw. Nos. 1 and 2 in the world. Nadal, the man who's taken the modern power baseline game just as far as it goes, versus a man who has transfigured that modern game, whose precision and variety are as big a deal as his pace and foot speed but who may be peculiarly vulnerable to, or psyched out by, that first man."

Federer was champion in '06 and '07, but that summation presaged what would unfold last July. The 2008 final may have been the tennis match to beat them all. McEnroe, Borg and Laver - the old gods - were all in attendance and ordained it as the best they had seen.

James Lawton, the celebrated London sportswriter who seems to have been on hand for most of the key events of the past three decades, was left in no doubt of what he had witnessed. The Wimbledon final, he wrote, represented, 'cleanly, beautifully, the very essence of all that is best in sport and in a way I had never seen before and do not confidently ever expect to see again'. (There is still a chance that Mr Lawton may revise his opinion: he has yet to witness, in the flesh, an Ulster final between Derry and Tyrone).

And that, of course, is what it boils down to. There is such a deluge of sport raining down from the satellite television orbs now that it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish the truly special from the merely hyped.

As recently as 20 years ago, sport on television was rationed as judiciously as chocolate in wartime. That was why the big periodic extravaganzas like the World Cup and the Olympics were regarded as universal treats for people who enjoyed sport.

Flick on the television on a random night now and a run-of-the-mill League Cup tie between Grimsby and Arsenal is huckstered and pitched as though it represents a turning point in the evolution of football.

And the problem with the relentless hyping is that it makes it impossible for those who sell the game to achieve a suitable tone when it comes to a truly significant sporting occasion - such as the meeting of Manchester United and Chelsea in the Champions League final in Moscow.

That final, on a sodden May night, between the old aristocrats of Lancashire and the nouveau riche Londoners was another big event that played havoc with the global television schedules and seemed to go on forever. Over 120 minutes of action could not separate the rivals and after the exquisite torture of the penalty shoot-out, the night's fate rested on John Terry, the big centre half who seems to embody all the traditional English football qualities - including a propensity for missing once-in-a-generation penalty kicks.

What a lonely place for Terry to find himself, standing over the ball on a rainy night in the Luzniki stadium with the eyes of the football world watching him - none more piercingly that his ultimate employer, Roman Abramovich, whose presence in Russia's capital with Chelsea FC - his chief jewel and plaything - was supposed to mark a triumphant return to the motherland where he made his billions with such mysterious speed.

Instead, it was another night of coronation for Alex Ferguson, the gimlet-eyed Scotsman who seems hewn from the same stone as, Busby and Shankly, those earlier giants of the English national game who hailed from north of the border. Ferguson has repeatedly deferred his promise to retire and his strange unquenchable thirst for harvesting yet another three points out of those raw February visits to places like Blackburn or Hull shows no signs of abating.

It cannot be about the money any more for Ferguson, or even about gilding his own legacy: could there have been a more perfect time than to bow out than after Moscow, the 50-year anniversary of the Munich air disaster? Rather, his longevity and formidable drive must surely be about the elusive chase for excitement and highs that ordinary life - even when he is indulging his passion for horse racing - cannot give him.

Stepping away from sport has always proven difficult for sports people. There was surely more than another lucrative payday (although with 11 children to support, the Santa list must be hefty) behind Evander Holyfield's decision to return to the ring again - against the heavyweight champion of the world - at the age of 46. Many men would baulk at the notion of a 5km jog at that age, let alone consider getting into the ring with a 7ft Russian. Vanity, ego, curiosity and boredom - the desire just to feel the thrill of a packed stadium - must also have played their parts in luring Holyfield back as much as the pay cheque and he is just one of many examples of sports people who hang on.

But Holyfield made one pertinent observation about sport. "It's a sin to get old."

How true. In politics, Barack Obama is portrayed as a Kid President at the age of 47. Only a year younger, Holyfield feels as though he has been ushered to the nursing home. Of course, for all the hazards facing Obama over the coming months, eluding the fists of a behemoth Russian will not be among them.

It is a commonly complained that sport is all about money now. And although that is largely true, there is so much wealth in sport that it renders the importance of money irrelevant.

Tiger Woods made an estimated $127 million last year. Money can have very little to do with his ongoing pursuit of perfection at this stage. Through many golf seasons, it seemed as if Woods was engaged in a rivalry made remote by decades - that he was battling the achievements of Jack Nicklaus as much as his contemporaries.

But last year's stunning performance of Pádraig Harrington at the British Open in Royal Birkdale has sent an electric jolt through the sport. He became the first European to retain the Claret Jug since James Braid set the standard in 1906 and just four weeks later broadcast the message that he was long-haul Majors material by becoming the first European to win the USPGA. It could be that the likeable and patient Dubliner turns out to be the most successful big-game hunter on the golf plains in the coming seasons.

Harrington's triumph will represent the highlight of the year for many sports fans in this country. For others, it could be any of the events that are described in the following pages.

The chilly night in Limerick when Munster took on New Zealand and, after a match when fantasy and reality seemed to merge, achieved not a victory but the more bittersweet sensation of what Leonard Cohen once patented as "invincible defeat."

Or perhaps you are one of the many who count Kilkenny's mastery in the hurling championship as the apotheosis of the sporting year. The second coming of the Tyrone football team, who yet again seemed to catch a wave with unstoppable velocity, also struck a chord with many.

There is so much to choose from and already, so many of the most vivid events of the year seem distant - it does seem a long time now since Harrington plodded up the 18th at Birkdale enjoying the applause as the engraver went to work on adding his name, again, to the illustrious honour roll.

Perhaps that is because the sporting year of 2008 had, at its centrepiece, the gargantuan festival of the Olympics. The Beijing organising committee spent $44 billion to ensure that the XXIX Olympiad was the most impressive and smooth- running in history.

The preceding months were foreshadowed by protests primarily against China's policy on Tibet as the symbolic torch was paraded through the major cities of the world. World leaders made half-hearted addresses questioning the Chinese humanitarian record. The Chinese did not blink and promised the greatest show on earth.

In the end, everyone turned up.

The Opening Ceremony, staged in front of 100 heads of state including Messrs Bush and Putin, was a full-on presentation of design, imagination and man- power that seemed like as clear a proclamation as any that the Chinese are the coming world power.

It featured 15,000 performers and revolved around the numeral eight, China's totemic digit and must have made the London 2012 committee realise that Bruce Forsyth and Take That! simply won't pass muster.

But for all the stunning choreography and imperial muscle-flexing in Beijing, it may well be remembered for the lousy fact that the Chinese officials replaced one little girl chosen to sing the Ode to the Motherland with another on the grounds that the stand-in child took a better photograph: they wanted the cute face of China to look winsome.

In the end, the biggest show on earth was governed by the same murky politics of a backwater child beauty pageant.

The Olympic sport was mostly excellent, incessant and the Games were dominated by two figures: the eerily calm, amorphous Michael Phelps, who won eight gold medals without uttering one pompous-sounding phrase and Usain "Lightning" Bolt, the fastest man on the planet, who uttered nothing but pomposities yet managed to sound charming. These two were the undisputed kings of the 11,000 athletes who showed up bearing private dreams and the hopes of their countries.

It is a vast and imperfect spectacle, the Olympics, monstrously hubristic and a vacuum for fabulous sums of money that are spent in ways that are arguably sinful when placed against the extremes of poverty and deprivation in too many parts of the world. And yet in a strange, messed-up sort of way, it sometimes touches on the goofy goals of harmony and international brotherhood that informs its message.

The Olympics took place in August. It was high summer and the powerbrokers of the world were still in champagne mode. For all the faith the Chinese have in the lucky number eight, it has not brought the troubled globe much prosperity since.

In the months afterwards, financial empires would crumble and the Western belief that there would always be enough would be severely chastened. As global credit vanishes, the Olympic splurge is starting to look a little criminal. 2008 might well be recalled as the high point of the limitless excesses of which sport is frequently guilty, with Beijing the heedless party that preceded the Fall.

In 2009, the budgets and ambitions of big-time sport will be leaner and none the poorer for it.

But if the past year has taught us anything it is that for all the vast sums squandered and all the imperfections of our putative sporting heroes, there is still magic to be found.

The joy of it is everyone has their own opinion as to what that special moment of 2008 might have been.

But the essence of it was to be found on that turbulent July evening in London, when two men continued to hammer a tennis ball back and forth across the net long after the light had failed, all alone except for the millions who wished it did not have to end.