KEY POINTS:
Set aside the argument over whether Portugal even deserved to be at the World Cup.
Forget the scoreline or the fact that the All Blacks had run up 16 tries on their way to sailing past the century mark.
Remember instead the moment eight minutes after halftime when
the Stade Gerland erupted in delight as Portugal's portly replacement prop Rui Cordeiro clutched the ball tight and ran back to halfway having scored his country's only try.
The Portuguese fans who had roared themselves hoarse rejoiced and in a sense what followed - a further 56 points - missed the point.
This was a game between one country with only one target, to be achieved next month in Paris, and another operating to far smaller objectives.
Portugal did themselves proud, ran to a standstill, and only those with the hardest hearts would not have shared their delight.
The Portuguese marched on to the field with an arm on the shoulder of the player in front, rather like a group making sure no one got lost on the way home at 3am.
Their emotions showed through in a rousing singing of their national anthem and they had enough moments during the match to be able to say it had all been worth it.
In the first half, first five-eighth Goncalo Malheiro walloped over a 45m dropped goal, then leapt and punched the air as if he'd scored a soccer World Cup matchwinner.
And Cordeiro, who in the warmups looked more like the manager than a player, got his try, which with the passage of time will surely become a 25m surge past flailing tacklers, rather than a squirming, shoving drive from about .5 of a metre.
They all count, just as Portugal's coach Tomaz Morais, pointed out afterwards. This game will add massively to the game in his country, dominated as it is by soccer and its Cristiano Ronaldo's and Luis Figo's.
His players knew what lay ahead, never gave up and "all the players who went out came back as survivors".
Morais also put in an eloquent plea not to reduce the number of countries at the cup. Twenty helped the game in countries such as his, he said.
He drew an analogy with the Olympic Games, where some athletes are there for medals, others strive merely to achieve personal bests without a hope of a medal.
"There are teams who play to be champions and teams who play to achieve their own goals," he said.
"We came to fight so small countries like ours will have an opportunity like this."
There is a valid argument that a collection of tonkings won't actually help in the overall plan, that maybe a two-tier system would be a better option, encouraging teams to win promotion from, say, a Pool B to a Pool A.
But try telling that to the wide-eyed nipper perched on his mother's knee yesterday; or the teenagers who had made the journey from Lisbon and reckoned it was worth every euro.
