AS any parent of young children will tell you, the hour before they are dispatched off to bed (which is another hour before they stop coming back up looking a drink or to tell a story or ask the same question they asked six times already) can be a rough ride.
Tears are often high on the agenda.
The ready-made, completely irrational, I’m-past-myself kind of tears.
So when our eldest approached the kitchen table just as supper was being readied, there were any one of about a thousand things that could have caused the emotional outburst.
There was no making the garble out the first time.
“What is it, what’s wrong?”
“I’m just so sad the Olympics are over!”
Baked into the sadness was perhaps a realisation that her ticket to staying up late every night for the last two weeks had just expired.
But she had been so completely engrossed in everything to do with it.
The morning run at YouTube was forsaken, replaced by whatever rowing or cycling or break-dancing was being shown.
There were occasional bursts of interest through the day, directed largely at Simone Biles, but where it really came to life was in the evening time.
Whatever wasn’t done by half-seven didn’t get done until the news came on at 10pm.
Imagine that seven-year-old grows up in a world where Paris 2024 becomes a normal Olympic Games for Ireland.
That it only ever gets better from this day forth.
Truth be told, the Olympic Games have often bypassed me.
A background event, not one to be consumed whole by.
Part of that, and I didn’t even really realise it until this time around, was the fact that so many of the Irish competitors were hidden from view.
The one saving grace of being unable to watch Paris on RTÉ in the north was that the green vest was present in so many finals that you couldn’t have missed them.
The norm for an Irish sprinter has always been to show up for their heat and try to make a lifetime best but ultimately come fourth or fifth or sixth at best. Five seconds of fame rather than five minutes.
Irish swimmers don’t make Olympic finals, let alone openly talk about expecting to win them.
They don’t win back-to-back gold medals in anything.
Those are the trends of history that Rhasidat Adeleke and Daniel Wiffen and Kellie Harrington have bucked.
Why shouldn’t we aim higher?
The Olympic Games of 2024 have changed everything about how we should look at ourselves as a sporting country.
In the gold and silver and bronze that hung from their neck, the tears that ran down their faces as they smiled up at the tricolour, there was an immediacy to the sensation of victory.
But if things are done right then the legacy of Paris 2024 will be the summers of 2036 and 2048 and forevermore.
Winning at the Olympics is no longer a spectator sport for Ireland.
It is something we’re now part of as a country.
This is a party we want to stay at.
Physical education remains criminally undervalued and misunderstood in terms of the school curriculum.
It’s on the timetable, loosely encouraged for those that are happy enough playing a mainstream sport.
If it wasn’t for the GAA providing coaches and its members that teach taking school teams, you’d dread to think how little physical activity school would offer.
To me, the Olympics opened a crevice through which so few will ever crawl. Gold medals in the summer games, they just don’t happen to the ordinary five-eighth.
But everyone sees the crevice and the seven-year-old can aspire to it, they can build that base of good habits and a good lifestyle that will carry them through their lives.
That’s particularly true for young girls.
Being sporty was so deeply stigmatised for so long that it will take at least another generation or two before those wounds heal over.
Summers like this, though, do so much to help.
There’ll be very few young girls capable of growing up to run a sub-49 second 400m, but all we need to find is half a dozen every eight or ten years.
It would be criminal if Sophie Becker and Phil Healy weren’t both sat down in the next week or two and offered the chance to leave their daily employment in favour of becoming full-time athletes for the next four years.
In a country whose government had such a surplus of funds last year it doesn’t really know what to spend it all on, I mean, come on.
The Olympic Games is the best of everything.
Can’t run? Swim.
Can’t swim? Ride a bike.
Can’t ride a bike? Get on a horse.
Don’t have a horse? Shoot clay pigeons.
No gun? Break-dance.
It is about developing future Olympic champions but it’s also not.
It’s about getting young people off the sofa and engaged with whatever form of a lifestyle that will carry them into an active adulthood.
A new four-year cycle towards LA 2028 began yesterday.
But a new life cycle of Irish sport has been kicked into gear by the fortnight just gone.
It is too good of an opportunity to waste.
Honest to God, if I was in charge of the schools, there would be at least an hour every single day of physical activity.
If it’s as simple as lining up at the fence and racing to the bottom of the playground, that’s all it has to be.
That’s where it starts. Athletics Ireland will never have the resources to push it through schools themselves.
Being active has to become national policy.
The best place to make that happen is in school.
It wasn’t just our eldest that watched these Olympics through the eyes of a kid seeing this for the first time and thinking it could be normal.
We all did, for this was the Italia ‘90 of running and jumping and boxing and thrashing up the Seine.
Our Olympic present has to be our Olympic future too.
I’m sad it’s over too.