Even by the old ground's standards, Lansdowne Road witnessed a special day, in which the feel good factor lingered long after an emotional rollercoaster ride. From absorbing to celebratory to more taut than a Carlos Santana guitar string and then finally joyous relief. Not a bad old afternoon's entertainment all in all.
Dip into the past and picture an Irish team seeing a well-deserved 19-point lead being whittled away to a score by a French team playing catch-up in the final quarter. Could you imagine it?
Whatever about wilting legs, wilting minds would have commanded that the ball be leathered down the pitch as far away as possible from the Irish line. And a baying Lansdowne Road crowd would have been willing it too. Cue French counter-attacks and constant Irish tackling.
This time around, Ireland didn't panic - one blemish by David Wallace apart. They kept the ball in hand, kept setting up targets and kept recycling it. In short, kept their nerve.
By rights, Ronan O'Gara would then have landed the 75th minute penalty or 80th minute drop goal chances which deservedly followed from Ireland's positive intentions, thereby giving Ireland and the crowd the breathing space of a two-score lead.
In any event, Ireland had as much of the ball as the French in the last ten minutes, and made their tackles across the pitch when they had to in deservedly closing out the win. It would have been a sickener to lose. But the consequence of the way the game panned out made this an even bigger win and a huge psychological leap for this developing team.
"The whole package of being through a game like that is very valuable when you come out the far side with the right result," maintained assistant coach Eddie O'Sullivan afterwards. "Obviously if it goes the other way it's very damaging to a team, and even the boys who came off the bench, their contributions were outstanding. We needed more than just fresh legs, we needed an impact, which is what they all did. That was critical."
"We would have kicked everything away in the past and just panicked in possession," agreed Warren Gatland. "We would have tried to hang on and we didn't do that. We've talked about playing rugby and apart from a few scary moments we continued to play rugby for most of the game."
The trump card, yet again, was undoubtedly Brian O'Driscoll, with his ducking and weaving and breaks off static ball through hordes of blue. "If O'Driscoll had been French today, France would have won," claimed French coach Bernard Laporte, in also hailing the Irish midfield trio of Ronan O'Gara, Rob Henderson and O'Driscoll as "the best in the world."
"He's an ace poacher," commented Eddie O'Sullivan, observing: "Guys in soccer make millions of pounds with what he has." And like all great football poachers, he's a tad selfish in front of goal, which is hard to quibble with given he creates so much.
Last year Ireland came off a famous French win to lose at home to Wales, possibly a beneficial long-term kick in the derriere at the expense of finishing second as opposed to third. A relative irrelevancy really, and now a salient reminder for this Irish team.
"Apart from England every team is capable of beating everybody else on the day, and it's going to be a fresh, unique challenge all of its own," said Gatland. The only injury concern in what is likely to be an unchanged 22 come Thursday is Henderson, whose bruised shoulder has the respite of a week off due to Wasps having no game, and he reckons he will be fine.
Gatland did not rate Saturday's win as highly as last year's in Paris, and Peter Clohessy revealed: "Everybody was delighted but it wasn't anything spectacular. We were confident that we were going to win so it wasn't that much of a shock to us."
True it didn't scale the heights of last year's O'Driscoll hat-trick, yet in many respects this was better. Weightier expectations always rest uneasily on Ireland's shoulders and not alone was this a defensively stronger French side, but the old cliche about them being poor travellers has actually been flipped on its head in recent years.
