Sean Maguire said he'll keep working and keep dreaming of pulling the Republic of Ireland shirt after the Kilkenny man scored his first competitive goal for Preston North End in front of watching Republic of Ireland assistant manager Roy Keane on Saturday.
The former Cork City striker guided home a fine header to put the home team one up against Barnsley, who levelled just two minutes later through Brad Potts. That's how it stayed, but Maguire, stationed in a No 10 role, was thrilled to get off the mark.
Having been named in Martin O'Neill's provisional 39-man squad for the World Cup qualifiers against Georgia and Serbia but subsequently cut, the Kilkenny man is now desperate to keep turning heads.
"It was a massive honour for me to get into the provisional squad," he told the club's website.
"It's something I've been dreaming of since I was four or five, when I started playing football.
"I just need to keep performing at this level. One day down the line I look forward to hopefully pulling on that Irish jersey.
Of his goal, Maguire added: "I've just stuck my head on it and it's glanced into the bottom corner.
"Myself and Jordan (Hugill) I think work really well together with that big and small man combination, and you could see that; we created chances and created space for each other and that's something we can build on heading into Tuesday (against Cardiff City).
"We created the chances and it will be different if we weren't getting into the positions to create those chance. We got ourselves into the lead and it was a bit of bad fortune with their goal."
Preston boss Alex Neil was impressed with Maguire, having giving him a slightly different role against the Tykes.
"I thought Sean had a good game," the former Norwich gaffer said.
"I opted to play him as a No 10 because having watched Barnsley, if you try to play through central areas like Sunderland did for instance, Barnsley were capable of nicking it and counter attacking so we wanted a runner in there rather than a technician if you like and we wanted to work the ball into the flanks rather than play through the centre.
"I thought it worked in the main and we had the best chances in the game."
