SIDELINE CUT:From Rory McIlroy's thrilling first major victory to Stephen Cluxton's ice-cool finish to the All-Ireland final, the year provided some unforgettable sporting memories, writes KEITH DUGGAN

Oh 2011, where did you go? Up in flames, according to most of the economic bulletins. But the good old world of sport, safely cocooned from the bothersome constraints of reality, supplied an ever-avid audience with its usual avalanche of weirdness, of courage, of preposterous wealth and of staggering displays of athletic brilliance.

As usual, it all went by in the blink of an eye. And if you could take the world and spin it anti-clockwise on its axis and see the whole pantomime playing itself back, which of those moments that made you stop for a moment would once again leap out at you?

Would you drift to Rory McIlroy slumped over his golf club, the picture of misery in the perfect heat of Augusta last April? That was the moment when he suddenly looked like a lost boy in a cut-throat world, when the surf-chic golf apparel and the Northern Irish bounciness could not disguise the fact he had suffered one of the most crushing sports experiences imaginable. Everyone agreed what happened to McIlroy was sad – except for the player himself, who showed up in Washington less than two months later to win his first Major title in thrilling style.

Or maybe you are returning to that slow walk by Stephen Cluxton from his goalmouth in Croke Park to where the ball lay awaiting his address in the last seconds of the All-Ireland final. It is easily forgotten that on All-Ireland final days, the Jones’s Road stadium is up there with the biggest crowds in the world. The transatlantic dimension to Gaelic games remains strong, particularly now that a new wave of Irish people is leaving and the whole habit of gathering in the salons of Perth and Chicago is back in business.

The Dublin-Kerry mythology, Dublin’s first All-Ireland title in 16 years and the peculiar sensation of having 80,000 people in the stadium fix their attention on you; it would have been easy to fluff his lines in that instance. It didn’t matter that Cluxton had practised that free hundreds of times over the season or that because he maintains a public silence and rarely betrays emotion on the field, you get the impression he never makes mistakes.

The man is human. It took some nerve, that last act.

Or maybe you find yourself drifting to another part of the world and to a noisier individual altogether. Every dog has its day and Dennis Rodman took stock of an exceptional life in sport last August, when he gave a faltering and uncomfortably honest appraisal of his successes and shortcomings during his induction speech to the NBA Hall of Fame audience in Springfield, Illinois.

The loose canon of American sport is pushing close on 50 now but he remains a lithe 6ft 9in man and he showed up for his official recognition from basketball’s high society in typical fashion, his face adorned with metal, a gemstone studded jacket and cuffs he might have borrowed from Liberace.

And then the man who spent 15 years taking the greatest pleasure in being the hate figure for opposing fans, the man who took delight in being jeered and kicked out of games and for getting under the skins of players who had come into the big league the smooth way, stood in front of the podium, looked out at an audience that was there to wish him well and froze.

For two whole minutes, he stuttered and fought back tears and then delved into an unscripted account of the mess that his life would have been except for sport. He was 20 years old and living on the periphery in Dallas, working as a janitor in the airport and feeling directionless until a freak growth spurt gave him the height advantage to match his athleticism and antagonistic style of play.

In a few years, he went from an obscure college scholarship to being the anti-hero on two of the most charismatic teams of modern times: the 1988 Detroit Pistons and the 1995 Chicago Bulls. His story is familiar. An impoverished childhood, an absent father and a fiercely tough mother who banished him from the house in his late teens when his behaviour became ungovernable and who sat before him now when he apologised before the world for his many failures.

Or maybe you will return to Alex Ferguson sitting stony-faced in Wembley last May as Barcelona ran his Manchester United team ragged in the showpiece of European football.

Seventy years old and still brimming with fury and optimism and energy; it is hard to imagine the day that Ferguson won’t be there.

It may be Brian O’Driscoll’s slow trudge from the field in Auckland that day against Wales that you recall. Some chances don’t come around again. Or maybe nothing in live sport over the past year quite matched the thrilling sensation of watching Ayrton Senna’s mad, brilliant racing life unfold in Asaf Kapadia’s brilliant film.

2011 was the year that Carlos Tevez, another superstar who emerged from poverty, earned €179,000 a week for not playing football. It was the year when Tiger Woods discovered what it was like to be just a regular, journeyman golf professional and when Mike Tindall learned what life with the Royals is going to be like. It was the year when Joe Frazier bowed out and the world cast one last longing look at the duel he fought with Muhammad Ali. And in 2011, Richard Keyes asked, “Did you smash it?”, and the Premier League postponed Tottenham v Everton while London rioted and undertones of racism returned to English football fields and there was nothing left to say about poor Gary Speed except “God speed”.

Maybe you’ll remember 2011 for Wayne Rooney scoring that classic goal in the opening half of the Champions League final in May or for Wayne Rooney giving two fingers to the fans in July. Or maybe you’ll recall it as the year that Ryo Ishikawa, the Japanese golfer, decided he would donate every penny of his tour earnings to the relief fund for the earthquake that struck his country.

Maybe you’ll remember it as the year you finally finished that marathon, that triathlon that five-kilometre walk. You could remember it for any one of a thousand things.

Me, I’ll think of an end-of-season afternoon in the press box in Thurles when a few thousand people showed up for the Munster hurling final. Our colleague Diarmuid O’Flynn from the Examiner was there. For years we knew Flynner as a Cork man, a hurling man and a wearer of flamboyant headgear.

But for the past year, he has been torching both ends of the candle, running a Sunday morning silent march against the bank bailout in his hometown of Ballyhea.

He spends hours working out the latest bond repayments and posts the bleak results online and to media organisations. He tried to run the whole way from Cork to Dáil Éireann to register a protest vote and ended up in Nenagh hospital. He was hobbling around a press box a few days later.

He has this burning energy to make himself heard and can’t understand why Irishmen and women are so passive about what is happening in this country. At least he knows he can look himself in the eye if it all goes to hell.

But that day in the press box, he was in cheerful form as usual and grinned as he slyly told the rest of us that it was an auspicious date. “A year since the bailout!” he announced just before the ball was thrown in.

And to a man we agreed that time flies.