Now that Paul McGrath has called it a day the world is a smaller, meaner place, its crucial ozone layer of romance depleted dangerously by his absence.

The soccer landscape he leaves behind is filled largely with tight-lipped young blades with $100 haircuts and mobile phones that only spiv agents have the numbers for. There is something impressive, but joyless, about them and their funless intensity. The money comes gushing in early and the limelight makes them squinty. They play the Bosman ruling as calculatedly as a lawyer walking through a loophole. More and more they seem as remote as the celluloid cowboys we used to watch in silver screen westerns.

With Paul McGrath we never felt that his gain was our loss. He walked through the big time as our ambassador, a sort of national brand name who reflected all our failings and weakness but still gave us reason to feel good about ourselves.

There won't be his likes again. He didn't slip off a conveyor belt and into his place in the production line. He went through his career like a trick cyclist on a tightrope. Twenty-two when he was lifted from St Patrick's Athletic and born off to Old Trafford: these days clubs are throwing kids back into the river if they look like they've started shaving. He was only in his late twenties by the time rumours began to circulate that his treacherous knees had him done for.

When everyone else was playing tippy tappy out on the training field, McGrath was in the gym, out of the rain, possessing the best touch in British football, as indelible as a birthmark.

For a time in his life he seemed to fall in with more poor-quality friends than Monica Lewinsky. Yet he never radiated the hopeless dimness of the classic soft touch. The shyness and decency and open face just seemed to reflect the most appealing aspects of humanity's frailness. There is a small part of each of us which resents the fickleness of the modern, pampered professional. But you never heard or read one line of judgemental cant about Paul McGrath.

We will never indulge anybody with quite the same love with which we indulged him: the wry smiles, the shaking heads and the merry rumour game we all played on those days he went missing.

Not missing on the pitch: literally missing. The team in Albania and Paul McGrath in Cork, or maybe Israel, or rumoured to have been seen in bad company, but good spirits, in every taphouse in Ireland.

When the end came and it was announced to journalists at Dublin airport - on the morning we left for Bucharest last April - that Paul McGrath would not be travelling. The surprise was quickly digested and the rumours were swiftly dressed up and sent out to do their work.

It was a pity. The arguments will roll on well into the next century about how it ended and why it ended. But, by and large, we miss the point. In many cases McGrath's popularity has been used as a pike to jab Mick McCarthy with. They both deserve better.

The great odyssey had to end sometime. The national affection for the player was such that we would have picked him till well into his dotage and been confident that the others were merely letting him down. Yet to have played for Ireland until he was within touching distance of 40, to have enhanced two World Cups, to have won a record number of caps and to still have left the stage with the audience howling for more, well, all these things are testimonies to his greatness. We had to start auditioning the understudies before they grew old.

Maybe memory airbrushes the past, but McGrath's prime is in close enough proximity to the mind's eye for it to be accurately assessed. That day in Giants Stadium stands as a high point in a range of peaks. In 50 years, when times are hard and the grandchildren need to know what life was like before swashbuckling became a mortal sin, we will show them the video of Paul McGrath playing against Italy.

Phil Babb worked like a pack dog that day in the New Jersey heat, doing the running and the chasing and the fire brigade work. He can seldom have played better. But he is the second man on the moon, the driver of the car Kennedy was shot in. We will always remember McGrath beside him, the icon coolly setting out his full bag of tricks like James Bond in boots.

McGrath's is a great story waiting to be told, a great book waiting for somebody perceptive to write it down carefully.

A black man pre-eminent in the affections of a country which fears diversity. A genius whose own failings must have broken his heart on days when we just celebrated and indulged him.

That day when Ireland played Italy Phil Babb and Paul McGrath were picked out immediately afterwards to provide urine samples for drug testing. These things are supposed to be random, but it was only human for science to wonder if there was anything special working for the heart of the Irish defence that day. Every footballer on earth would have wanted some.

It was this ghost-writer's job to pin down Phil Babb for 10 minutes or so that Phil might furnish the bones of a column which he was then contributing to this paper. So while Babb and McGrath were waiting for dehydration to pass and for the pure spring waters to replenish themselves within their bladders, they sat sipping the king of beers while your excitable correspondent flitted around them like a four-year-old at Christmas.

Babb was so frustratingly laid back about his part in the greatest day in world history that he was in danger of falling asleep. Looking for some sort of mirror for his own excitement, the giddy hack turned eventually to McGrath, whom he didn't really know at all, and said something like, "Cripes Sir, you are certainly the son of god, the majesterial incarnation of all the powers of the heavens and today has been your greatest miracle so far."

And Paul McGrath shrugged and said, "Ah yeah, it went ok," and took another sip of his beer and said, "I just wish I felt like going to the toilet. I don't want to hold the bus up."

Shaken but not stirred, thanks.

It's pretty far down the list of the FAI's things which need to be done, but someday it would be nice if soccer in Ireland had some sort of Hall of Fame. Nothing tacky. No wax dummies and crepe paper, but something to diminish the distance between ourselves and big time soccer, a multimedia job with videos looping and bites of commentary running and interactive areas and a nice tasteful shrine to Paul McGrath.

The American sportswriter Jimmy Cannon once observed that a man seldom changes his mind once he decides which heavyweight champion was the greatest of all times. So it is when it comes to anointing the greatest Irish player ever to walk across the field of our imagination.

Paul McGrath. And the mind is not for changing.