In these days of pestilence and burning carcasses, it sometimes seems that all that separates us from medieval times is sport. Even with the smoke of disaster in our eyes these past few days, if you loved sport you were able to see the possibilities that mere humans enjoy. In these worried times, there were displays of grace and guts which restored some of the lightness to our being.

He wouldn't like the idea, but if we were to cheer ourselves up and decide that this week should be International Roy Keane Week, the only person who could possibly feel annoyed (apart from Roy, who is at his best when annoyed) would be Paula Radcliffe. Sport was fully returned to us on Saturday, and in Keane and Radcliffe we had two thumping great stories with which to make us born again.

How do you fathom somebody like Roy Keane? How do you run the finger across the last 10 years of his life and reckon the kid he was with the man he has become? How do you take a little lad from Mayfield, who always struggled for height and muscle, a boy who had to write to every league club in England cadging a start - how do you take that kid and make him into the man who can walk onto an international football field and conduct the game for 90 minutes without a sliver of self-doubt?

Mick McCarthy commented on it afterwards. Keane affects everything on the field with the mere force of his personality. Not just team-mates, but opposition and officials. He is in charge. He never stops moving and he never stops talking.

"What must it be like to be told you are marking Roy Keane," mused Mick. Like being told to gather some hot mercury onto a fork for your breakfast, one imagines.

We watched Keane from a seat high up in the lovely GSP Stadium (precisely what Dublin needs by the way!) and he went through Saturday night's game in a cold rage. If he wasn't subduing the ball with his feet he was bawling at colleagues until their ears blistered.

Not for the first time it occurred to us that Roy is the solution to football's crisis of spiralling wages. Forget about paying players what they're worth: they'll just play better under one of Roy Keane's baleful cattle-prod stares. And there'll be no nonsense out of them afterwards.

It takes sublime self-belief to set yourself up as the bossman in situations like that. The world waits for the ancient comedy of you falling on a banana skin. With Keane it never comes. On Saturday he was our best defender, our key midfielder and our top striker.

If Robbie Keane had scored a wondrous goal like Roy's second, he would still be somersaulting and nobody would begrudge him his joy. Roy produced his miracle as a matter-of-fact piece of business, instructional if you were a forward, inspirational if you were anyone else. No big deal if you were Roy Keane.

His 50th cap, two goals, a performance of such immensity that the old newspaper device of player ratings seems an inadequate gauge of his contribution. It was easy to forget that Saturday's was the sort of game we could actually have lost: we played better football on both trips to Macedonia and came away in tears. This time Roy Keane dragged us through it. "Yeah, I got frustrated," he said afterwards, "but I always get frustrated in games."

And that was about as far as we could go in talking with him about his performance. He despises the sound of fanfare. Just about anything that happens on the pitch is dealt with under the broad heading of "that's just my job". Saturday though meant a lot.

Mick McCarthy deserves a summer in the big time after several years of bad luck. He deserves it all the more now after the past week of quiet grace when he was stoic and solid, having lost the man who taught him how to hold a hurley, the Dad who played a million games of football with him in the big field across from the McCarthy house.

The field was known as the "rec", and the kids around used as often knock on the door to know if Charlie McCarthy was coming out to play football as they would to know if Mick McCarthy was available. Anyone who ever heard the Irish manager tell those stories knows what he went through last week.

Mick McCarthy was a hero these past few days and so was Roy Keane. Lots of newsprint has been wasted dreaming up a rift between those two. Saturday should have put an emphatic end to that. They've earned the other's respect, and sport doesn't offer us many better examples of old-fashioned decency and professionalism than the pair of them.

NOT many examples, but Paula Radcliffe is another. If you wanted to show your kids about honesty and perseverance and the poverty of thought that tells us that nice guys finish last, you would pick out Paula Radcliffe as the inspiration. You'd take the clips of her heroic failures of the past few years and her lovely graciousness in the aftermath.

This column had the fortune to meet Radcliffe on the day after the 10,000 metres final in Sydney, in which she had finished an agonising fourth, and she was flawlessly lovely, a perfect example of sport being a journey to the limits within oneself. You'd take the clips of those races and then tag on Saturday's race through the Belgian mud.

A woman with a nodding head, a worried face and a red ribbon calling for honesty in her sport taking it away from Gete Wame and getting what was due to her after 10 years. Listen. If you didn't ball your fist and shout "Go On Girl" as she pulled away, well, you are lost to humanity.

It was a weekend of big sport, a weekend when we needed heroes if only to stop us staring at our boots. Maybe we're in the gutter, but we have the stars to look at. This time they didn't fail us.