When, genuinely, all is in doubt right up to the final seconds just before that last little white ball disappears below ground.

The point is that last Sunday at Carnoustie was great sport, regardless of who was involved, and there are plenty who would have been giddily engrossed anyway. But what Padraig Harrington did was give the nation another reason to huddle around its television and enjoy an afternoon for the ages. Mothers watched and wailed at the 18th, sisters bit their necklaces during the play-off. By Monday, it was hard to run into anyone who hadn't been glued to their set.

Have you ever heard such goodwill? Such a genuine outpouring of congratulation? Such a noticeable lack of begrudgery? In a summer that was in danger of being remembered for nothing more than psychotic weather and a grizzly murder trial, this was . . . is . . .

an unequivocally good news story.

Something for all of us to smile about.

Can pictures capture it all?

Maybe. That smile and fist pump when he finally realises for sure that the ball is in the hole is just about perfect, his right heel off the ground a touch as he finds himself almost unbalanced by the whole experience. The tension in his face stares out from all the the other pictures save for the final one, his homecoming on Monday in Stackstown. Even the embrace with Paul McGinley is that of a man welling up, a man almost too happy to smile.

Rebecca Naden's photo at the top-right of the facing page is undeniably the sweetest of the lot, though. None of us is so hardened that we can't smile at a little kid's delight in seeing his Da at the end of a day, oblivious as little Paddy Harrington is to what the rest of us have been through. And equally, nobody's so cold as too deny that poor Sergio Garcia needed a hug from Caroline Harrington after all that, just before he went and sat in the locker room and wept.