The personal highlights reel of 1998: being at Holland v Argentina in Marseilles, the perfect marriage of ambience and occasion. That, and getting hopelessly lost in Paris on the night France eventually won the World Cup.

Then there was the joy of watching Martin McNamara become, to all right-thinking people, the footballer of the year. The thrill it was to watch the Clare hurlers rage against the machine. Sitting in the sun in Wrigley Field, Chicago, watching Slammin' Sammy Sosa as his home run race with Mark McGwire ignited.

A day spent with Tony McCoy, being educated all the way. A train journey in France with Brian Kerr. Ditto. And the childlike awe which Robbie Keane or Mark Scanlan or Michael Donnellan can still inspire. Reassuring to feel it.

How do you sift through it all for the gold and the dross?

Well, Brian Kerr continued to amaze. When you get in free to sporting events you get picky about what you would actually pay for. I'd mortgage the house for a Brian Kerr press conference. Plus the kids for an interview. Manager of the year. Philosopher of the year. Man of the year. Give him Gay Byrne's radio programme. No single act was as awesome as Michael Jordan in game six of the NBA finals early in the summer. Only the most sportingly myopic would examine the past year and elevate Michael Owen's momentary glimmer above the most extraordinary contribution to a winning cause that sport is ever likely to see.

Jordan is a wonder because he defies everything that we sad sentimentalists believe to be true about sport: i.e., add too much money and too much hype and sport seeps its soul. Doesn't it, Tiger? But Jordan? The best paid, most lavishly-hyped athlete in the world can transcend his sport and his mere mortality in a manner which is starkly and traditionally heroic.

Take game six. Picture it as a personal thing. All through this year's series (and last year's), Utah's Karl Malone has struggled to prove that he can do for his team what Jordan does for Chicago. Stags clashing in the glen. Jordan is old, but cannier than perhaps any other athlete who has ever confronted age.

By game six Malone has already failed, but there is no shame in that. Not against Jordan. Yet, with Jordan, there can't be just a burial, there must always be a tramping down of the dirt. Eighteen seconds of game six left and, just as Malone's reputation could still revive itself with oxygen, his team still have a shot at the big one.

Utah are leading by a point and need one more score to consolidate and bring the series to a seventh and final game. They deliver to Malone, who shall deliver unto them. This is the big man's moment. Go Karl! Instead, in Salt Lake City, 20,000 jaws drop. They see Jordan materialising as welcomely as the grim reaper. With exquisite genius he steals the ball from Malone at one end of the court and, amid the mayhem, keeps possession until the clock runs down (the sheer arrogant insouciance of that deed alone) and then breaks for the basket. The end.

Six seconds left, but game over, series over. Malone is a melted candle. Jordan has scored 45 points, including the last eight for his team. The Greatest.

Jordan was a wonder, and so was Sonia O'Sullivan. Sonia was a season-long show. We wanted to place our fingers into the wounds in her sides just so that we could believe that she was the same woman we saw crucified twice over in Atlanta and Athens.

Her splendour is her grace. Not just her stride, but her manner. Long is the list of pundits and opinion peddlers who pronounced her dead and buried after Athens in 1997. This column, indeed, was among those which purported to have examined her wrist for a pulse only to find nowt. The world is full of gombeens of lesser talent who would have found in those hasty obituaries a lifetime's supply of bitterness. Sonia just accentuated the positive, eliminated the negative, and as usual didn't mess with Mr In-between. She dismantled old systems and put new ones in place for herself. There was desperation in it, but there was huge courage, too. She met the world with a level stare and blamed nobody for lamenting her demise. From Marrakesh to Budapest, her competitive zeal had a dreamlike quality about it. We'll remember those raised arms and brilliant smiles for a long time. There has never been a greater Irish sports star.

Which brings us to . . . The Throbbing Headache of The Year, won for the third year running by Michelle de Bruin.

I watched Michelle De Bruin through the lens of an expanding drugs scandal and wondered the same thing that I wondered while watching her press conferences in Atlanta two years ago.

Come with me. Lay aside all the doubts, all the swimming science, all the inconsistencies, all the stories, and just swap places with Our Lady of the Chlorine.

Look at yourself. You are Michelle de Bruin. You are small and hard-working and at last, breathless and heaving, you have placed your hand on the grail and the world has shaken its head and said: "No, you are a cheat".

Where is the baffled anger? The riptide emotion? The incoherent rage? We see the poise and the media savvy and the good lawyer and we hear the creaky story of what you say happened. But without the churning moral indignation, we can't buy into the theory that you and Erik are the Sacco and Vanzetti of modern sport.

The story isn't fragranced with innocence and neither are the deeds. Long before his wife became a human decanter, Erik is on the record as having celebrated the death of the noted drug scientist Manfred Donike. Just as coldly and reprehensibly, Michelle has made cobra hisses at the couple who tested her last January. Al and Kay Guy join Marion Madine and her father, Bobby, Janet Evans, three Olympic silver medallists, a host of journalists and a handful of honest Irish swimming people who will be keen to get the taste of this sad, bitter, little story out of their mouths when it finally ends.

The sad, pointless pathos of it is what will linger. You think of Michelle and the days after the Barcelona Olympics when she came home with her swimming career seemingly over and a new boyfriend filling her thoughts. She had been to two Olympic celebrations, trained with great coaches (Deryk Snelling, Pierre Lafontaine to name just two), travelled the world, won a scholarship. That kid had squeezed the very best out of herself. Freeze the frame. She must have known more pure sporting fulfilment at that time than at any moment since.

And there's the hope for 1999. That sport will find that type of fulfilment again and that heroes will be as big and fine as Michael Jordan, Sonia O'Sullivan and Brian Kerr.