You will know by now, as I, at the time of writing, do not, how Sonia O'Sullivan got on in the 5,000 metres final in Athens last night.
She may have been tailed off at the back of the field, trampled by the hooves of youth as time rushed onwards. She may have clung on with admirable resilience for a respectable top-10 placing. Or, just maybe, in one of those rare and utterly improbable moments when fantasy and reality turn up at the party in the same outlandish costume, all the bad karma of Atlanta returned as a blessing and she somehow got a medal.
The point of interest beyond the confines of the sports pages, though, is that whatever happened won't have mattered much. Uniquely in the turbulent terrain of the Irish dream world, Sonia is now invulnerable to ordinary notions of success and failure.
We Irish have a strangely ambivalent relationship to those twin impostors. People of my generation grew up on that peculiar paradox, invented as a description of the 1916 Rising but used for a great deal else, the Triumph of Failure.
The Rising was a fiasco, but the State emerged from it. We were miserably and inexcusably poor and underdeveloped but this represented a great spiritual victory over nasty materialism and kept our special values intact. Mass emigration was a corrosive and distorting force in our national life but sure it gave us a great unworldly empire.
The great goals of State policy - reviving the Irish language, securing a United Ireland, keeping people on the land - were all missed by a country mile, but we took immense pleasure in the infinite repetition of our determination to reach them. The religious traditions we inherited were corrupted by authoritarian arrogance and the abuse of power, but we still declared ourselves a beacon of sanctity in a godless world.
In the last 10 years or so, this culture of heroic failure has been replaced by an ethic of success at all costs. We have adopted the American habit of regarding the word "loser" as the ultimate insult. It is not accidental that sporting metaphors began to proliferate in Irish economic and political discourse as the boom took off in the early 1990s, or that successful sports figures became the star attractions at business conferences. Their motivational techniques of envisaging victory as heaven and defeat as hell fed into a view of society in which competition replaced justice. The winners take all and who cares about, or even remembers, the also rans? To be a loser is to be utterly contemptible.
This new culture is just as pathological as the one that went before it. Irish society desperately needed to slough off its fatalism and mediocrity, its comfort with the second rate in everything from art to zoos. We needed an injection of kick-arse attitude. But we're not in general comfortable with the new order either. We still remember and value the fun and humanity and complexity that are being squeezed out by the relentless and mechanical culture of success.
It was this ambivalence that made the Roy Keane saga in Saipan such a great national psychodrama two summers ago. Keane's awesome contempt for the acceptance of mediocrity struck a chord. But so did the confused decency of a guy like Niall Quinn, desperately trying to keep the show on the road, to keep everything in perspective. If most of us changed our minds twice a day about which side we were on in that argument, it was because we really wanted a bit of both - the relentless drive and the humane sense of proportion, the desire to be the best and the desire to be good.
Which is why, I think, Sonia O'Sullivan isn't just admired or respected in Ireland. She's loved. If you compare her to the only Irish athletes of the last 40 years who can rank anywhere near her in terms of achievement - Eamon Coghlan and John Treacy - the contrast is striking. Both those men were, in their heydays, hugely and rightly respected as fierce competitors who overcame disasters and achieved great things. Sonia did all that too, but has been taken to our hearts in a different way.
Coghlan and Treacy were damned for their near-misses and hailed for their successes. O'Sullivan is loved for the whole shebang: the breathtaking invulnerability and the heartbreaking vulnerability, the astonishing certainty of some of her victories and the unbelievable totality of her implosions.
It matters hugely that when she was at her best she won, not by sheer speed, but by her majestic domination of her opponents. But it matters just as much that when she was at the summit she plunged headlong into the abyss, that the invincible machine broke down and wept. It is the arc of her story that makes her much more than a sporting champion. If, as everyone expected, she had won gold in Atlanta, her silver in Sydney would have been an anti-climax and scraping into the final in Athens would have been a sad coda. Instead, Sydney was a joyous resurrection and last night's race a lap of honour in which, regardless of the outcome, we could applaud her for reminding us that success and failure are complicated concepts.