Nostalgia can be a murderously dangerous beast, especially when visited on celluloid. Old footage has a habit of reminding us things weren't actually as rosy in the garden as our memories would have us believe; it has a way of dancing all over our recollections as if they were false dreams.

On Sky Sports on Sunday (yawn, yawn), they delved back into the archives to relive English football's glory days - all the way back to 1966 - and the World Cup final win over West Germany. But it lacked the imagination of RTE's offering on Friday night, a feast of memories from Italia `90.

Whoever came up with the idea for RTE to screen four hours about something that happened a decade earlier (when Ireland actually won nothing) may, at first, have been deemed certifiable; but it was a brave and utterly fulfilling exercise. The final package was presented brilliantly, with some side-splitting sketches from the Apres Match team, magical memories of the Irish team's odyssey to get to Italy (in the first place) and to reach the quarter-finals when they did, and, amid it all, some telling observations from people outside the sporting world who recognise the value of sport to society.

Many of these observations were delivered in a piece called Where Were You When O'Leary Scored? As we discovered, most of the people interviewed 10 years on were in pubs on that day.

Included in that number was the comedian and actor, Ardal O'Hanlon - and also actor Stephen Rea, Dublin footballer Charlie Redmond, singer Maire Brennan and journalist Liam Mackey (all in different establishments, it must be said) - and, in fact, if my own hazy memory serves me correctly, most of the country, i.e. those who hadn't taken out second mortgages to travel to the tournament, viewed Dave's goal in some smoke-filled hostelry or other.

Anyway, while team physio Mick Byrne stated his belief that the Irish team's endeavours in Italy kick-started the Celtic Tiger by giving Irish people new belief, he found an unlikely ally in O'Hanlon who claimed the team gave the country a "huge tonic" and were "instrumental in turning the economy around . . . and emphasises the importance of sport."

The sad thing is O'Hanlon doesn't believe we, the Irish, are capable of replicating that summer of 1990, remarking that the "way this country has gone, everyone so full of it now, people probably wouldn't get excited about something again in the same way."

Perhaps he's right, maybe he's wrong. The truth is, the sheer innocence - remember the Give It A Lash Jack anthem and the gaudy t-shirts in Moore Street? - that accompanied Jack's men on their magical mystery tour wouldn't be around today and any new march on the world's football powers would likely be accompanied by greater pragmatism. And, going off on a tangent, with the first phase of the Bertie-Bowl gone out to tender, perhaps what is needed down the line is a professional superteam based in Dublin to recreate that era which the not-real-Eamon-Dunphy of Apres Match told us at the start of Friday night's marathon "spawned `Davy Keogh says hello', the corporate ole olers, (and) inflatable bananas."

But those were the days, weren't they?

Although Que Sera Sera, first screened back in 1990, kicked off the trip down memory lane, there was sufficient new material, all delivered in a light but professional way, to bring back the tears and the smiles and the feel-good factor. As Jack Charlton himself reminded us in one soundbite, his team was built on reality. He recalled coming back from the 1986 World Cup finals with a notebook full of notes and realising "the whole world played in exactly the same way . . . they all played the sweeper man-to-man marker, pushed the full-backs up, (and) the full-backs became the suppliers to the runner, in many cases what you call the playmaker." Rather than imitate or attempt to play catch-up, he decided to "inflict" his game on the opposition.

Or, as the not-real-Eamon-Dunphy character told us, "Packie Bonner gets the ball, he puts it up into the air. Whoof! There it goes. It comes down, it's miscontrolled by one of Niall Quinn's octopus limbs, it flicks off somebody's arse and we lose possession."

Many of the purists may have disliked Charlton's methods, but they delivered a golden era for a small footballing country who weren't afraid of any of the perceived superpowers. As one of the fans interviewed in another segment of the marathon admitted, she "could have bought three houses" on the money she put into travelling to support the team. Another supporter didn't question the expenditure. "Football is our religion," he said.

Some of the soundbites from the O'Leary extract managed to capture the mood of the nation. Eileen Dunne, the newsreader, recalled how a decision was made to go live to the penalty shoot-out with Romania on RTE's main evening news, interrupting a European summit meeting to do so. "Everything else was just dropped because it was of no relevance any more," remembered Dunne. And that's the way it was. Sport, through football, had put a spring in everyone's step.

That penalty kick by O'Leary somehow captured all that was magical and almost unreal about Ireland's journey towards the summit of world football that summer.

When people saw him walking towards the goal to take that fifth and decisive penalty kick, there was mainly a sense of disbelief.

"Oh God no, please God, this is a joke," was how Charlie Redmond - who knows a thing or two about missing penalties - remembered O'Leary's long walk.

"Oh my God," is how Mick Byrne, standing beside Charlton on the Genoa pitchside, reacted. "I don't think he'd ever taken a penalty before . . . and I knew him since he was 13," said Byrne.

"No, stop, go home, someone grab him," is how O'Hanlon reacted when the defender took an eternity to place the ball on the spot.

Of course, O'Leary scored and he ended up at the bottom of a scrum as the entire Irish entourage jumped him . . . and we knew it was all real, that it really happened, when the footage finished with George Hamilton - in an Hawaii-Five-O shirt that simply couldn't have been dreamed up - interviewing him and O'Leary paying due thanks to his Ma and Da. "I hope I've done them proud," he said. Those responsible for the four-hour trip down memory lane, and the Apres Match team, certainly did the Boys in Green proud. They did a good job of reminding us things really were quite rosy back then.