It's fitting that at the end of Northern Irish golf's greatest decade, the Open Championship should return to Irish shores.
Golf's oldest tournament is bound for Portrush for the first time since 1951 (That Mayo fans aren't citing this as an omen is a sign of how demoralised they currently are).
Viewed on the TV set, the courses on the Open Championship rota can be hard to immediately tell apart from one another. All burnt, undulating fairways, wild, tangling rough, pot bunkers and regular close-ups of the beach. They all have some forbidding country manor style structure (that being the clubhouse) looming over the 18th green. You can nearly smell the sea salt and the fish and chips wafting off the screen.
Each do have their own characteristics, however, and the following has been gleaned by the various rankings of the Open Championship rotas that proliferate on the golf-nut corner of the internet.
St Andrews has the most history but in benign weather conditions will get destroyed by modern players.
Turnberry is the most picturesque but now labours under the disability of being owned by Trump.
Carnoustie is the most brutally tough though you wouldn't be charmed by its beauty.
Muirfield is revered as the fairest test and has produced the most star-studded set of winners but the club's tardiness about admitting women members garnered a welter of bad press.
St George's Sandwich's unpredictability makes it the most disliked by the players, Lytham opens with a par-3 for some reason, etc, etc.
Jack Nicklaus's famous formulation was that the courses got worse the further south you went, which was viewed - and probably intended - as a slight on poor old Sandwich which is down in Kent and the only regular on the south coast.
How will this intruder on the rota from Northern Ireland stack up against the regulars? What seems to be beyond doubt is the majesty of the golf course.
Golf Digest currently ranks it as the seventh best golf course in the world outside of the United States. As it happens, that only makes it the second highest Irish course on the list. It lags behind Royal County Down which comes in at a tidy No. 1.
For a long time now, Padraig Harrington has declared Portrush his favourite golf course, adding the tagline that "it will be different every time you play it".
(Never afraid of a bit of leftfield, blue-sky thinking, Harrington yesterday suggested Portmarnock as an Open Championship venue, citing the example of the 1998 Tour de France).
The biggest fear about Portrush, and one of the factors which kept it off the rota for near seven decades, is the logistical challenge.
From an R&A perspective, the 2012 Irish Open was an interesting trial run. Irishgolfer.ie detailed this week how Peter Dawson, the plummy voiced former R&A chief executive, and his favoured course designer Martin Ebert, attended the Irish Open that week "almost in disguise".
130,000 spectators flooded to the venue that week to watch Wales's Jamie Donaldson win the Irish Open by four shots. It was a tight squeeze and it left some wondering whether the course could accommodate the even bigger crowds drawn to an Open Championship.
Shane Lowry was one to question the space issue.
"The only bad thing I'd say is the crowds are too close to the fairways and greens, which would make an Open too easy, I think," the 2009 Irish Open winner told reporters.
"All the rough is trampled down. If you just miss the fairways you’re fine and stuff like that, which is not normal at an Open."
Ebert and Dawson were satisfied there was something there and the former got to work. One of the chief weaknesses according to the connoisseurs were the two closing holes, which lacked the grandeur demanded of a Open Championship venue.
Ebert co-opted the land from some of the nearby 'Valley Course', to construct two entirely new holes, the 590-yard par-5 seventh (Curran Point) and a 430-yard par-4 for the eighth hole (Dunluce).
As a result the closing hole has changed. The new 18th is the old 16th, a 473-yard par-4 called 'Babington's' in which the fairway swings sharply from left to right.
When winning back in '51, nattily dressed Englishman Max Faulkner famously played a deliberate slice into the green after his drive had nestled up against the out-of-bounds fence to the left.
Tweaks have been made to other holes, with several of them extended in length to offer the course greater protection against the bigger hitters.
Early indicators this year are the fairways are somewhat less burnt and brown-hued than your standard Open Championship style venue.
The R&A have said that should the tournament prove a success, they will be back at Portrush before long and it will become a fixture on the roster, alongside Birkdale, Troon, Muirfield, etc.
Of the 147 Open Championships played, 90 have been held in Scotland, 56 in England and only one in Northern Ireland until now.
The six counties punch substantially above their weight in golf terms, both in the glory of its courses and the quality of its players.
And the North's leading players all have a deep association with Portrush.
Graeme McDowell's accent may have a heavily mid-Atlantic bent these days but he is Portrush born, growing up just down the road from the famous links.
He spoke this week of playing his first round there as a 13-year old, hitting "at least 103".
"The first time I played it, we kind of snuck on because my brother and I weren't quite 15 handicaps and I think juniors had to be at that level to play.
"Anyway, we went and played and it was literally like we were at Augusta for the first time. It was a summer evening and I was around 13 years old."
Dungannon-born Darren Clarke, who will hit the first tee shot on Thursday morning, owns a house overlooking the links and is a club member.
The honour of striking the first tee shot is usually reserved for Gene Sarazen style old-boys who no longer harbour serious aspirations of winning. Given that it's only eight years since Clarke won the whole shebang, he could be miffed but all reports are he is not treating it as a slight.
Better acquainted with Portrush than any other touring pro, the 2011 Open Champion has served as the go-to man for comment from the media about the changes to the course.
Rory McIlroy grew up further south, over Down direction, but it was around Portrush that it became apparent he was a golfing superstar in the making.
Back in July 2005, at the age of 16, McIlroy demolished the course record, carding a 61 in qualifying for the North of Ireland Amateur Open. The changes to the course for the Open have ensured that the record can't be bettered.
And it's not just the modern champions that will be name-checked this week.
The 4th hole here is named 'Fred Daly's' after Ireland's first Open Championship winner and another Portrush local and club member.
A year after claiming the Irish Open title at Portmarnock in 1946, Daly enjoyed his finest hour at Royal Liverpool, winning the 1947 Open Championship on a rather eye-watering score of 21-over-par. Until Padraig Harrington's win in Carnoustie in 2007, Daly was the only major champion from the island.
Unsurprisingly, Daly was in the hunt too in 1951. Portrush's finest sat third on the Friday after an excellent round of 70.
He remained in the mix over the weekend but could never reel in Faulkner and wound up finishing tied-fourth, which, it should be noted, was an unremarkable performance by Daly's standards at the time. Including the 1947 victory, Daly achieved five top-five finishes in six years between '47 and '52.
The question is, can one of the local heroes do that bit better this time around?
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