It would be grossly unfair to the paint industry to characterise the American football played last night at Croke Park as watching paint dry. Suffice to say that by the end of the second quarter of the game, the only people sweating were the 16 cheerleaders who played a blinder by jumping and gyrating to fill in the long pauses between play.
However, the large crowd who turned out to see the first pre-season National Football League game between Pittsburgh and Chicago to be staged in Ireland seemed to enjoy it. They sat in the sun-drenched grounds, which had been transformed into a little America.
I do apologise. There was indeed a huge rush of excitement, but that was before the game began when a number of US military parachutists dropped in to start proceedings.
The excitement was generated because a fair breeze threatened to blow them against the Hogan Stand and most people enjoyed watching them drag frantically on their guide cords to steer them in.
In the end they landed neatly in the centre of a Croke Park which will hardly ever again witness such glitter and glitz, with a full hour of singing and dancing, bands and swaggering before the Bears from Chicago and the Steelers from Pittsburgh eventually made it out on to the field.
When the Americans do things they do them big. They don't field a team of players, they field a battalion. Big fellows, too, of all shapes and sizes, padded up like spacemen.
For the purists, the Steelers were playing into the Hill 16 end in the first quarter. Not that you would recognise the Hill, hidden as it was behind television camera hoists.
The main problem with the game seems to be the halting of play to allow television advertising to be relayed. How could any sportsman or woman become passionate or really involved in a game when you have to pause for TV ads?
A Chicago gentleman sitting beside me did his best to persuade me that what was going on out on the field was wonderful and exciting. He had plenty of time to do this because of the long pauses which he described as "tactical".
The game itself is a little bit like the CIA, which celebrated its 50th birthday last week. It's about territory, defending your patch with large numbers of personnel, as the CIA has defended American interests around the world.
A GAA man from Kilkenny witnessing his first game of American football in the flesh said he thought that given a few hundred years it might develop into a decent form of rugby or Gaelic football.
Despite that, there was a huge influx of Americans from all over Europe and the US for the game, only the 28th to be played outside the US.
An estimated 5,000 Americans may have made the trip here and they were joined by many supporters of the game from the UK and Germany, where it is now well established.