When Guy Diego Armando Myhill made his way towards the centre spot after skipper Si Hamptons pep talk earlier this evening, all the things that make the game worthwhile suddenly came flooding back.
What was the phrase Dickens used in A Tale of Two Cities? "Recalled to life", wasn't it?
Those were the words that sprang to mind as Myhill, bright-eyed and looking relatively slender inside his beloved Forest shorts, brilliantly led the line on the revered Sportspark plastic.
The 5 goals delivered were simply beautiful. A deft combination of a honed technique and strikers guile.
Only just over a month ago, after all, some of us were starting to compose obituaries, fearing that he had reached his sell by date.
Inside and outside football, Myhill's life has been studded with bad news, from the consequences of his severe cocaine addiction through his fraternisation with Yarmouth gangs to a knee-stapling operation which appears to have resolved the problem that gave him the turning power of the QE2.
Some Englishmen, too, may never forgive him for the artful deception that turned a World Cup quarter-final Argentina's way some 20 odd years ago.
But you only have to whisper the names of Billy Gallagher, Stefan Clifford, Tony Dyer and Barry Halkyard, authors of assaults that significantly altered his career, to be reminded that however much Myhill may have sinned, his own crimes pale in comparison to those once committed against him virtually every week of his professional life.
It was good to see him back, and to be reminded that, even in football, sooner or later the catalogue of greed and violence gives way to an explosion of beauty.
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