you take what you're given day by day with no room for haggling. In this market, a two o'clock tee-time is a trolley dash and Harrington made sure he filled to overflowing.

By the time he rose, his caddie Ronan Flood was already away out on the turf of Carnoustie checking pin positions.

As he walked into the kitchen of his B&B, he noticed two fresh sleeves of Titleist Pro VIs sitting on the table, three new balls in each. At first it struck him as a little odd since he knew there was no way Flood would have headed off to the course without fully stocking up the bag. But he and Flood have long since mastered the art of being on the same page . . . they're married to a pair of sisters, after all . . . and it didn't take him too long to work out what they were for.

Johnny Smith invariably finds himself part of Harrington's retinue on some of the big weeks. Boyfriend of little Paddy Harrington's nanny, he would often spend much of the weekend with them before heading back to Dublin on the Sunday night for work the next morning. It had happened before that he'd missed the aftermath of a victory due to having to catch a flight so when Harrington had teased him on Saturday night about how good he was feeling and what a win the following day might mean for Smith's chances of making work on Monday morning, he'd told him not to worry, that he'd already taken it off.

In the kitchen, even though Harrington had a fair idea what was going on, he quizzed Smith over what the story was with the six balls. Turned out Flood had rung back to the B&B after he'd left and got Smith to take them out and asked him to carry them around for the day. "They're in case we need a play-off, aren't they?" Harrington stated rather than asked. "Yeah, " said Smith.

Harrington smiled. A sixshot deficit and yet his caddie was thinking play-off. That made two of them.

Four or five times the night before, he'd casually dropped into conversations the fact that he thought he might pull it off. Dr Bob Rotella was staying with him for the week . . . a pure co-incidence born out of the fact that Carnoustie isn't the kind of place you'd find a Hilton rather than any masterstroke of forward planning . . . and whether it was his presence or just a general good feeling, Harrington was a model of positive reinforcement all night. Ever since forever, the idea of predicting a win for himself has been anathema, tempting fate like a tap-dance on a glass table.

Here, he felt like hopping the ball a few times to test out the ground.

"Did I believe it? Would I have put money on it? No.

Would I have put money on myself at 22-1 or 25-1 before the tournament started? No. But I think I did believe it. Logically, I didn't. If you asked me to get my logical brain out and get the left side of my brain working I would have said, 'No, I'm not going to win, I'm six shots behind.' But me throwing it out there was me very much trying to get into the right side of my brain. 'I'm going to win . . . this is it.' It wasn't a fate thing. I didn't wake up that morning and say, 'Ooh, the stars are aligned, I'm going to win.' It was just a matter of enjoying the concept of, 'Yeah, I'm going to win.'" Also notable about Saturday night was the fact that he didn't spend a minute on the range. Time was, you couldn't have pulled him off it with a winch, his fairly Calvinist appetite for work regularly keeping him out there until dusk drew its final curtain.

That's not the way of it these days. He's learned to accept that if he's in contention for a tournament there can't be an awful lot wrong with his swing and that tinkering with it incessantly can cause as many problems as it solves. It's a bit like a man trimming his beard . . . clip a little too much off this side or that side and by the time you realise it didn't look all that scruffy to begin with, the whole thing is gone and you have start all over again.

"I think it changed when I changed caddies. Definitely.

It was one of the reasons I changed caddies. Ronan is very resolute in being careful about how I manage my time.

He'll never stop me from doing anything but he'll always point it out to me in such a way that I know if I'm going to do it or not. If I said, 'Look we'll go and hit some balls' on that Saturday evening, he'd say, 'Look, you may feel okay now but you need to be 100 per cent tomorrow, so why are you going to tire yourself out now? You played well, there's no need.'

"There'd be a number of different things I could do but it would still be my decision. It would never be anything but my decision. But I realise now that when I'm playing well in a tournament, my swing is dependable enough that I don't need to find it and fix it on a Saturday night. So I spend that time in the evening doing my exercises."

At 1.56, he walked on to the first tee, shook starter Ivor Robson's hand and bent down to open and retie his shoelaces, like he does on the first tee of every round he plays. Had the six-shot margin between him and Garcia housed 10 players he wouldn't have felt so hopeful but the fact that there was only one, Steve Stricker, convinced him that this could happen. Chip away on the front nine, get in the mix on the back nine, leave yourself with a chance. He went par-parbirdie, par-par-birdie, par-parbirdie for that front nine to do just that. He didn't watch the scoreboard. Never does.

Reckons they never tell you the whole picture anyway. A guy might be three under for his round but he could have chipped in twice and he's not going to keep that going for the rest of the day. Instead, Flood keeps an eye out for the main movers. They'd agreed on Saturday night that if they were in contention standing on the tee of the par-five 14th, Flood's decision over what club to hit would give Harrington a pointer. When he handed him the five-wood, he knew they must be there or thereabouts. As it happened, they were two back.

"That was a red flag that said we were doing well. That was a big decision by Ronan. And it was the perfect one. We played the hole for a four and ended up making three but there was every chance that if we'd tried for a three, I could have ended up making five."

The eagle moved Harrington to nine-under-par and capped the end of an hour which had seen a five-shot swing between him and Garcia. Finally, on the 17th fairway, he cracked and asked Flood what the state of play was.

He'd seen the crowd for his match get bigger and heard the cheers grow louder and knew he must have been in or around the lead and wanted to know if the safe play to the middle of the green was the right one. Flood told him they were tied for the lead. Two pars would get him home with a 65 and leave nine under as a hell of a target for those coming behind to try and reach. So he hit the centre of the green, took two putts and went to the 18th.

He didn't think twice about hitting his driver. Maybe if the wind had been left-to-right rather than the other way around he would have taken his three-wood but he had no qualms about the driver as he'd hardly missed a fairway with it all day. He just hit a terrible shot, is all. And followed it up with another.

"That was an incredibly tough shot, no doubt about it, but I hit a really poor one. On difficulty level, it was an absolute 10 but there's no getting away from the fact that the shot I hit was a really poor one. But once I got up near the burn and the crowd started cheering and I started getting into it then. I said to myself that nothing really spectacular has happened yet, I could chip this in or at the very least get it up and down. I paced it out, the numbers were good and it was a shot I knew I could play."

He looked at it and looked at it and worked out that it was actually the easiest shot he could possibly be faced with. A 49-yard chip with a carry of about 35 yards. Fly it up there, let it bounce and spin and check and stop. A shot he would hit 20 or 30 times a night out in his back garden.

Suddenly, he was 15-years-old, fooling around by the chipping green in Stackstown.

"That was the laughable thing about that shot. When I hit it and it was in the air, it was like I was a kid again. When I was a schoolboy, I used to show off to my friends by hitting a pitch really hard and making them think I'd made a mess of it but making it stop dead then beside the hole. It was completely the shot I'd hit if I wanted to show off. So when the ball was in the air last Sunday, you could hear the crowd gasp because they thought I'd made a mess of it.

I knew as soon as it left the club that it was going exactly where I wanted it to go and actually, when I heard the crowd gasp, I laughed to myself because it reminded me of those daysf It didn't even cross my mind that it was a difficult shot. That's the gas thing about it."

An hour and a half later . . .and after Smith had handed Flood the six balls he'd been carrying in his pocket for the day . . . Harrington was Champion Golfer of the Year, 2007.

The week since has been every bit the whirl you imagine it to have been. It's all been a joy but maybe Wednesday night when he and his four brothers took a few hours away from the world to play pool and darts down in his games room was the sweetest. When he went to see The Simpsons Movie on Thursday night, it was about the only time all week where he had neither a phone clamped to his ear for an interview nor the Claret Jug within his eyeline. Young Paddy hasn't managed to put ladybirds in it yet because, says his Da, "You'd have some very intoxicated ladybirds if we did."

And every day, he's woken up to a new world, one in which he's a made man. He's off to the States today for a trip that's going to last the guts of two months and a few of the big talk shows have been on the phone but he reckons he'll only do one. Maybe Leno, maybe Letterman, maybe Conan O'Brien, he hasn't decided yet. He knows well that there are going to be offers of obscene money for TV specials and the like and while he won't do them all, he'll do some. The odd major winner in the past has fallen foul of chasing the dollar all over the world and he's not inclined to let it happen to him. "But sure the back of the Indo says I'm worth a hundred million, apparently, " he laughs.

He's wearing the whole thing pretty lightly, all in all. He advises all those who won money on him last Sunday . . .half the country if the poor bookies are to be believed . . . to keep it firmly in their pockets in the coming week because there isn't a hope of him winning in Akron given that when we met him on Friday, he still hadn't lifted a club since Sunday. But when the USPGA comes around the following week at Southern Hills, he'll fancy his chances. He has to now. It's expected.