KEY POINTS:
It is 9.25pm on a Friday night that has heaved with a gamut of emotions at the close-to-bursting Stadium of Light in Sunderland.
Carlos Edwards cracks a right-foot shot that flies into the top-left corner of the North End goal like a tracer bullet.
The place goes wild.
Up in the directors' box, Niall Quinn, the Sunderland chairman, jumps out of his seat and raises his arms to the heavens.
The 44,000 Sunderland fans do much the same.
Down on the touchline, Roy Keane is rather more restrained - just a skip forward, a mock punch of the right arm and the faint trace of a smile.
The mind skips back to the evening of August 28, when Keane sat in a crowd of 24,000 watching Sunderland play West Bromwich Albion and pondering whether to jump into the football management game.
He had last been seen at the Stadium of Light in August 2002, elbowing Jason McAteer in retaliation and refusing Quinn's offer of consolation on his red-carded way off the pitch. How the old raging bull might fare as a manager tethered to the touchline was anyone's guess.
Few could have expected Keane to be standing quietly savouring this wonder of a goal, a 3-2 clincher against Burnley that put his Sunderland team on the brink of promotion.
They were 23rd in the Championship when he joined them, the day after that West Bromwich game.
Their graduation to the Premiership will have been assured this morning (NZ time) if Derby lost at Crystal Palace. It will be as good as sealed if Derby draws; the Rams would then need to overturn a goal difference of eight next Monday, when they entertain Leeds United and Sunderland travel to Luton Town.
Not that Keane will be counting his chickens over breakfast, or while he takes his family out for the day, favouring a trip to the cinema over coverage from Selhurst Park.
"It's still a big if," he says in the press room after acknowledging the fans at the end of the last home fixture of the regulation season.
"We still have a bit of work to do. There's no way in football you can get carried away because when you do you get kicked in the teeth."
All evening Keane has been the epitome of Kiplingesque calm, keeping the coolest of heads while all about him have been in serious danger of losing theirs.
Even when David Connolly had his first penalty saved and when Burnley went 2-1 up, there was no hint of panic as the Sunderland manager stood, straight-faced, hands in pockets, in the shadow of the home dug-out.
It is not just the Sunderland team that has been transformed in the past eight months. So has the image of the old Red Devil. Football management agrees with Keane, patently.
He can certainly manage. A haul of 82 points from 40 league matches attests to that.
The same can be said of the character that Keane has moulded in his team (Sunderland have won three of their last four matches with late goals) and of the quality of much of their play (Friday's winner was worked from the left-back position through five pairs of legs, a beauty to match the Vic Halom strike against Manchester City in the 1973 FA Cup run that was voted the best ever goal at the late Roker Park).
It is tempting to see shades of another Roker goalscoring hero in Keane, the fledgling manager.
His decision to depart for Barnsley last month without three late players had echoes of Brian Clough stopping the Nottingham Forest team bus to leave a moaning Garry Birtles stranded on the M1.
Like the manager who gave him his first break, at Forest, Keane would also appear to have a discerning eye for a player and an adeptness for getting the best out of them.
Connolly, a penalty misser turned penalty scorer, is one of several players in the squad who have been galvanised by Keane's influence.
In the press room, somebody points out that Connolly "has been at a lot of clubs".
"He's maybe not found the right manager," Keane says. The audience dissolves into laughter but not the Sunderland manager.
"I'm not being funny," Keane continues. "We all play for managers we mightn't see eye to eye with. Dave's had a few moves. I think Sunderland is a good club for him."
And for Edwards, Daryl Murphy, Dean Whitehead and many others, it would seem. When they lined up in the tunnel on Friday, Keane's players could see photographs of teams from the club's past all around them.
The manager had them put there by way of inspiration.
Most are of sides celebrating promotion - including the club's first, in 1964, captained by Charlie Hurley and managed by Clough's role model, the disciplinarian Alan Brown.
The 2007 promotion party might be strictly on hold at the Stadium of Light but Sunderland's managerial novice admits to having more than graduation in mind.
"If we do go up, that's when the real hard work will start," Keane says. "If we can get back in there, we don't want to just struggle along.
"We want to make our mark, like the Readings, the Wigans have done over the last few years."
- INDEPENDENT
