IF WES HOOLAHAN’s missed chance was playing on his mind as he poised himself to swing the ball towards the head of Robbie Brady in the last desperate minutes on Wednesday night, it certainly didn’t look it.

Instead, he appeared to have a pure and calm understanding of what must be done; that sportsperson’s nirvana when everything slows down.

It was a moment when everything suddenly made sense, and not just for Wes.

In the build-up to the match, Roy Keane pointed out that “this team has bounced back before and I’ve no doubt that we will bounce back on Wednesday.” At the time, it seemed merely a reference to Ireland’s qualification campaign, which sprang back to life after appearing doomed.

But Keane’s comment worked on another level. To be an Irish footballer these days is to know how to handle disappointment and come back stronger. Few of our players have enjoyed gilded careers of unbroken success.

Travails with club and country are an occupational hazard. Even those who were anointed early, like Robbie Brady, have had bumps in the road along the way. Others have battled their way from the mean streets of the League of Ireland or the English lower divisions. Big clubs don’t scout Irish players with as much enthusiasm as they once did, so scepticism is something they live with.

It’s a tough road, but it makes them tough too.

Hoolahan, at 34, knows all about that. So of course it made sense that a man who’d been told over and over again that he was too small, too slight, too much of a luxury player, but had kept going and going until he’d made it here to this moment in Lille, with the nation’s destiny in his hands….of course he was going to cast the miss aside and do what needed to be done.

For Hoolahan and his team mates mistakes, misses, rejections, criticism – even a demoralising defeat to Belgium just days previously – are just things to bounce back from. Nights like Wednesday are what make the struggle worthwhile.

If Lille brought deliverance to a generation of Irish professional footballers, it did the same for their equivalents in the stands. While the Irish fans have won friends and influenced people with their shenanigans in France, without success on the pitch the antics felt hollow.

As in Poland four years ago, there has been the sense of wanting a piece of what our fathers or uncles had in the Jack Charlton era. But while those adventures were inspired and illuminated by the exploits of the team that Jack built, without tournament achievement the current generation were simply celebrating being Irish abroad. They were like those historical reenactment societies that dress up as soldiers and re-stage famous battles, without firing a shot.

Now, the team have given the fans something to actually celebrate, other than our people’s admirable good nature and troubling relationship with alcohol.

Something had been missing for Martin O’Neill too. The Ireland manager’s career seemed strangely unresolved as Euro 2016 approached. The early promise that suggested he may become one of the great managers had run aground in the dysfunctional surroundings of Aston Villa and Sunderland. Was this it?

A scraped together qualification with the Republic of Ireland for an expanded Euros which offered little further hope of glory? Was this a career petering out?

Instead, it has been a crowning glory.

In those days between Saturday and Wednesday, O’Neill seemed to draw on every weapon of a managerial armoury honed over almost three decades. The hallmark quirkiness in public masked a mind whirring through the permutations of his flagging squad like the Bletchley Park codebusters of World War Two. There was the boldness to make big decisions that would energise the team and give it purpose. The ability to get the players mentally just right, to make them realise that this was the day, and that it was there to be seized.

All previous evidence suggests it is unlikely O’Neill spent painstaking hours on the training pitch walking through the tactical structures of the Irish team that took the field in Lille. Instead, he would have appealed to those players to deliver a performance from their hearts, their guts and their brains. The performance of a Martin O’Neill team.

“I don’t know what to say – my head isn’t really working” said Robbie Brady after the final whistle, understandably struggling to comprehend it all. But Wednesday night was like an episode of a long-running TV drama when unresolved and disparate plotlines are suddenly tied together, making everything that went before tally and fit together.

It was a rare night when everything about the Irish soccer team seemed to make perfect sense.

Jon Walters trained today and could be in contention to play against France