SOCCER: Mary Hannigan, far too young to have seen Best play, gets a sense of what made him so special by listening to those who were there.

It's rare enough that you wish you were more aged than you are but it's hard not to envy those of an earlier vintage who got the chance to see George Best play. Television, videos and DVDs are a passable enough consolation prize, but it's when you talk to those who actually saw him live, week in, week out, that you get a sense of the thrill and fun of it all.

There was the man from Carlow, who turned up at Stadio Delle Alpi in Turin in 1999 for the second leg of the Champions League semi-final against Juventus. He thanked God that unemployment took him to Manchester in the 1960s.

"Aaaaah," you said, "is it because that's where you met your wife?".

"Ah no," he said, "it's because that's where I got to see George Best play."

The love of his life. George, that is, not his wife. But she probably understood. George was probably the love of her life too.

And then the man from Carlow drifted away, his smile spreading as he recalled the sheer unadulterated pleasure of watching, from the Stretford End, George Best play football. And nobody, he assured us, played football like George Best. Nobody.

The days on the building sites filled the gaps between Saturday afternoons, home or away, the anticipation and expectation upon waking on match-day morning - wonderful, wonderful times, he said. Bobby Charlton, Denis Law, Nobby Stiles, Paddy Crerand, Willie Morgan, he adored them all, but George was a cut above, them and all the rest.

Why? What was it about George Best? The very great Scottish sports writer Hugh McIlvanney summed it up as only he could.

"George Best had come in along the goal line from the corner-flag in a blur of intricate deception. Having briskly embarrassed three or four challengers he drove the ball high in to the net with a fierce simplicity that made spectators wonder if the acuteness of the angle had been an optical illusion." 'What was the time of that goal,' asked a young reporter in the Manchester United press box. 'Never mind the time, son,' said an older voice beside him, 'just write down the date'. " Sublime.

So, for some of us ill-fated enough to have been born too late to see Best at his peak we make do with grainy memories of The Big Match on a Sunday afternoon and Brian Moore introducing highlights of the George Best and Rodney Marsh Show, aka Fulham around 1977. By then Best's career had turned in to a travelling circus, but for snatches of that season he was really the only show in town.

When, on the odd occasion, he was in the mood at Fulham we got glimpses of what we'd missed those few years before. And all you could do was marvel and thrill at it all. His talent was nothing like we'd ever seen before, and like nothing we've seen since.

It's as pointless as it is silly - and wearisome - to compare him with today's Galacticos, you may as well weigh Rembrandt against Rolf Harris or Bob Dylan against Michael Bolton, but you can't help but pine for his genius. And, most of all, for the fun and joy of it all.

As Roddy Doyle put it when Paul McGrath retired: "We are blessed, those of us who shared his age and nationality." The sentiment equally applies to the Belfast Boy. Rest in peace Georgie Best.