Supporting the Irish rugby team has for years been rather like being in love with a woman with a face like a train-crash for Kevin Myers
It made no sense, as love seldom does. Even in victory, there was little enough to boast of, because success was always remorselessly ground out: oats, millstones, slowly. Our gang of green-clad steers would storm into the boutique of blue-shirted antelopes of France, or the albino gazelles of England, or the scarlet impala of Wales, or the navy-clad roe-deer of Scotland, and beat them senseless.
No reason for pride. With luck, we might have had one or two world-class players in a squad: in the early 1980s, we had two, but both in the same position, at out-half: Tony Ward and Ollie Campbell. The only way to play the game with such limited resources was to imitate Chinese infantry, in human wave attacks. This usually involved putting forty players on the pitch and hoping that the referee couldn't count.
One word describes ancient Irish rugby: witless. Coaches could no more conjure intelligent play from such teams than Yehudi Menuhin could have conjured a Chopin nocturne from a gang of tone-deaf welders in a boiler-foundry. It was kills rather than skills rugby. Some of our front row forwards had IQs which matched their shoe-size, with foreheads wide enough to accommodate an eyebrow or two but no more.
Pitches were different in those days. Drains at best were regarded as something you boarded at sdations \, at worst an effeminate indulgence which smacked of unnatural, perfumed practices found in certain houses in Tangiers and Swanlinbar.
An elongated ocean of deep mud connected the two goals, so deep it contained currents and rip-tides, into which players regularly disappeared.
Indeed, the occasional well-preserved corpse from that time still occasionally rises to the surface in Lansdowne Road, prompting Seamus Heaney to dash off a poem or two in its honour.
When British rugby was at its most inept, an odd triple crown might come our way; and also, in years when the French were in one of their generous May 1940-moods, a championship. But there was never a grand slam, or any prospect of one. We were less also-rans than also-tottereds. Our three quarters might receive the ball occasionally, but only in the mail, and no other way. We played the kicking game, which required no more than two skilful half-back boots and eight programmed behemoths. So, even worse than mere failure was undignified success, and the way it was treated by outsiders: with wry amusement.
But stay! What exactly was happening a quarter of a century or so ago? What was going on in the bedrooms of Ireland that people started creating marvellous rugby-players?
Was there a popular guidebook to sexual practices which encouraged would-be mothers to assume one position which would within a dozen years or so produce a budding centre, and another position which would yield a skilful second-row?
We certainly need to know. These techniques should be encouraged amongst young couples today.
For as we all must be aware, the purpose of sex is not pleasure but to knit rugby players out of human wool, which was certainly what was happening between the sheets of Ireland sometime around 1980.
Moreover, it's one thing to have a centre of the class of Brian O'Driscoll. It is quite another to have a player like Gordon D'Arcy alongside him. Each is weft from the purest gold, but naturally, such match-winners arrive but individually, and perhaps once in a generation for the same country.
To have two playing together is rather like having Johan Cruyff and Pele in the same team.
For they don't complement one another, or double their threat, so much as achieve a lethal multiplier effect. Their danger is far more than the sum of their individual parts - and that's before we even think of the youthful and dazzling three quarters they'll be able to lay the ball off to next season: Geordan Murphy, Shane Horgan, Denis Hickie, and of course, Kevin Myers.
This prospect is causing rugby coaches all over the world to gnaw their pillows through the night: and not because of anything exotic or French that Mrs McCoach is doing. For Irish rugby has finally arrived at that place where genius prospers, where games can be transformed by the blinding insights of half a dozen or even more players.
Most particularly, Brian O'Driscoll and Gordon D'Arcy see opportunities others don't - as shown by Gordon's quite incredible tries, and in that moment when Brian urgently threw a touched-down ball to Ronan O'Gara to take a quick drop-kick.
The out-half didn't see what Brian could: the entire Scottish defence was upfield. A drop-kick deep downfield could have put the play within tiddlewink distance of the Scottish line, and moreover, would have stopped a few thousand Scottish ventricles dead in their tartaned tracks - always a pleasing achievement.
For next season, two modest proposals. The first is tunes.
All players detest the national anthem sequence anyway, without having to stand around wading through three of the damned things. Why not have Amrhán na bhFiann played once, in full when the President arrives, before the teams are on the pitch?
The second is for the players' mothers to describe in detail - preferably over the Lansdowne Road public address system - the techniques they used when getting pregnant. On their bellies, or their backs? Heels high or low? Girls! The future of Irish rugby demands that you pass on these little secrets! Meanwhile, roll on next season.