TV VIEW:WATCHING THAT Croke Park lights and fireworks display on Setanta on Saturday night, you couldn't help but worry that some fella was making his way home up Clonliffe Road, perhaps having had a jar or six, as the show got under way.

“We’re being invaded by what,” the 999 operator would have asked.

“UFOs! Thousands of them! And Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh and Bono and the Cranberries are shouting at them, but they keep coming!”

And that, indeed, is kind of what it looked like, although quite why several thousand little green men would want to take us over at this point in time, well, you’d have to wonder.

When the voice of John F Kennedy filled the stadium and he said “this has never been a rich or powerful country”, you could hear 80,000 voices reply, “well, certainly not now, bud”.

You know the yarn doing the rounds? A fella goes to use an ATM and it says “insufficient funds” and he says “wha, me or the bank?”

Well, there were many who reckoned that the GAA spending €500,000 or so on fireworks, at a time when “insufficient funds” has become the national motto, was unwise. But you know, so very lovely was it, it seemed a bit cheap at the price.

“There mightn’t be a lot of confidence around Ireland at the moment, but that was a bold statement by the GAA to celebrate 125 years of its existence,” said Daire O’Brien, who seemed to be with us on the belief that being dazzled in to forgetting for 30 minutes that we’re well and truly banjaxed was no bad thing at all.

It was a recession-busting emotional bail-out that reminded us that economic crises may come and go, but the GAA goes on forever.

Eugene McGee, back in the Setanta studio, reminded us that it was all paid for by an extra fiver on the price of each ticket, which he reckoned was grand, but he didn’t want the fireworks to overshadow the rip-roaring game that had gone before.

True enough, it was positively grand.

Mind you, there were periods in that first half when the game was as competitive as Serena Williams v Dinara Safina in the Australian Open final – 59 minutes of our lives that we’ll never get back – but after the “turkey shoot”, as Daire described it (lest you missed the game: Tyrone were the shooters, Dublin the gobbled victims), the Dubs came to life and made a contest of it.

But they lost.

When JFK spoke later to Croke Park, he noted that “our remarkable combination of hope, confidence and imagination is needed more than ever today”, and you sensed the words were aimed directly at the folk on Hill 16, most of whom were kiddies when, in the previous century, Dublin last ruled the Gaelic footballing world.

That was 1995 when a Democrat was in the White House and Take That were topping the Hit Parade . . . wait! Encouraging omens, no?

But it was Tyrone’s night, or Tie Rone as some still insist on calling them, like the county was named after that actor Power fella. (Although we’re reluctant enough to whinge. “I must apologise to some mad auld Gaelgoir fella who’s getting his knickers in a knot over the way I pronounced Al Eile,” as Ted Walsh once said, “it’s ‘Al’ Eile, not ‘All’ Eile – so after throwing yourself off the couch, I apologise.”).

And to be honest about it, we had trouble staying on the couch for the duration of the clash of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer (or Naydal v Fuderer as the Tie Rone people probably call them) because this pair’s contests have reached celestial levels.

It mightn’t quite have matched their Wimbledon meeting last year, but it was still ridiculously sublime. The BBC’s John Inverdale, no more than ourselves, struggled to understand how Nadal could have upped his game in that final set, with a level of fire and energy that seemed impossible.

“Ten hours of tennis of that quality within 48 hours?” he asked. Andrew Castle, a bit like Federer, had no answer.

“He is that bear with the battery that never stops running,” said Inverdale.

“Bunny,” Castle corrected him.

“Oh, yes, bunny I mean,” said Inverdale. But forever more we’ll think of the Spaniard as the Duracell Grizzly Bear who stands in wait for unsuspecting salmon leaping up a river, thinking they’re home and hosed, only to end up in the Grizzly’s tummy.

And Federer couldn’t have leapt much higher. But he came up against a one-man fireworks display. A majestic one too.

“Being dazzled in to forgetting for 30 minutes that we’re well and truly banjaxed was no bad thing at all. It was a recession-busting emotional bail-out that reminded us that economic crises may come and go, but the GAA goes on forever