Routinely, at the start of his season, he would talk about the nagging fear in the pit of his stomach which caused him to wonder if his game would still be intact after a winter in mothballs.

His confidantes, who had borne silent witness to the endless hours of toil he had clocked up in a quest to make him the very best player he could be, were positive he would come out stronger. But never Harrington himself.

You might have believed it was another of his psychological ploys conceived with selfmotivation in mind, or you might have thought the anxiety was artificial, and you would have been wrong.

Long after he had become a millionaire many times over, Harrington would be awake, his whirring brain already charting a map of the day ahead. When Nick Faldo wondered if the current generation of European players were too complacent and too content to watch their cash reserves mounting, he could have done worse than to have run his theory past Harrington first.

Harrington knew all about Ian Baker-Finch, a talented former British Open champion, whose game had disintegrated in a welter of extreme self-doubt. Since he turned professional, success and oblivion were invariably two sides of the same coin.

Even when he emerged from the mists of those interminable second-place finishes to win twice in America, to capture the European Tour order of merit title and to defeat Tiger Woods in a headto-head contest, he was still not regarded as a deal closer.

He had flirted with a play-off at the 2002 British Open, got himself fleetingly into the mix at Augusta, and then walked onto the 70th hole at last year's US Open with a share of the lead. Amid the sound of choking all around him, he failed to reel off the three pars which would have earned him a first major title.

He admitted later that Winged Foot was the "biggest disappointment" of his career so far, but he added that now he truly knew what glory smelled like. Others shook their heads. Maybe the more experienced he became, the more his nerve endings were fraying.

He was asked once what he thought it would feel like to be walking up to the final green of a major championship with an unassailable lead. He thought for a moment and, instead of a direct answer, he mentioned that Seve Ballesteros had felt a touch of anti-climax when he won his first Masters, because he had dreamed about it so often.

On the one hand, Harrington had always sought to play down the significance of winning a major. He refused to allow his career to be ultimately defined by the presence of a replica Claret Jug on his mantelpiece or by a faded green jacket in his wardrobe.

But for someone who has always appreciated the resonances of the game's history, the absence of a major on his CV was always going to hurt deeply no matter how much he protested to the contrary.

Like Ballesteros, he would have thought many times about how it might feel to be perched on the edge of sporting immortality. He would have rationalised it, played it over in his mind. It was no coincidence when he explained that winning the British Open at St Andrews above all other links courses would cap everything.

Take the case of John Daly, supremely gifted, but usually someone who just turned up and played. Never too bothered about his or anyone else's legacy, his victory at St Andrews could never have been the product of the sort of desire which was so in evidence last Sunday.

Or consider another American, Boo Weekley, who came to Carnoustie having never heard of either Jean Van de Velde or of Paul Lawrie, and who seemed to think that the Home of Golf might be situated near a trailer park in the Florida Panhandle. Weekley is a highly instinctive original, but for someone like him to have stolen the British Open from either Harrington or Sergio Garcia would have been a travesty.

Harrington's calamitous double bogey at the last hole wasn't committed by someone who was afraid, or paralysed by nerves. It was the action of a player who found himself in the place he had wanted to be for all his golfing life, and who couldn't quite believe that the moment had finally arrived.

He undoubtedly wanted the victory too much, and once again in the recesses of his own over-active mind, he doubted himself. After another impeccable Wimbledon triumph, Pete Sampras was asked what was going through his mind at a certain critical moment of the match. "Nothing, " he replied.

Harrington has never been that sort of born competitor. In those final minutes of regulation play, he would have realised all too quickly the personal enormity of having blown an ideal opportunity.

Whatever about a wayward drive at one of the world's most fearsome finishing holes, his third shot with a five iron that found the Barry Burn again was the stroke of someone in turmoil.

Too much insight, too much self-awareness invariably damages even the most talented competitor. At one moment, Carnoustie's home hole was Harrington's boulevard of broken dreams, then typically he managed to hole a five-foot putt at a time when lesser players would have crumbled under the strain.

Still, at that stage, the doubt both in his own mind would have been greater than ever.

The opening that presented itself last Sunday could well have been a once-in-a-lifetime moment. As Garcia moved to the 18th tee with a one-stroke advantage, it might not be an exaggeration to say that Padraig Harrington's wellbeing as professional golfer hung in the balance.

But once Garcia bogeyed to give him a reprieve, the destiny of the 2007 British Open was as good as settled. For one player, extra holes were like a resurrection, while for the other they were a penance.

With the psychological momentum firmly in his favour, it was no surprise that Harrington dominated the play-off until his understandably, but unbearably, strategic approach to the final hole gave him that short putt for glory.

Those three feet to destiny marked the end of years of self-doubt, and the beginning of the next phase of Harrington's career. The first major championship success is always the hardest.