The World Cup campaign trundles on and Ireland head to Lisbon in search of their miracle.
For the third campaign in succession, the consensus is that Ireland's prospects of qualification haven't survived the second match.
Nowadays, still being in the hunt for qualification down the stretch has become the new frontier in Irish football, in the way that actual qualification was in the old days.
This is the new normal of the 2020s. It was a prospect often warned about by the guardians of the game here, who for years have been telling anyone who'd listen that our talent production system was in a dire state.
From their perspective, this has already been a good week for Irish football, regardless of what transpires in Estadio Jose Alvalade. The government has committed €3 million to League of Ireland academies, following on from extensive lobbying from those in the sector, the most prominent being LOI academy director Will Clarke.
As regards the national team, there is the hope this is the beginnings of a process that will lead to a better future, perhaps culminating in Patrick O'Donovan holding the tricolour aloft in a stadium in Dubai (or wherever) after Ireland's quarter-final exit from the 2046 World Cup.
Elsewhere this week, news sites are carrying articles commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Shane Long's winner against Germany.
Sandwiched between that glorious past and hopeful future, there is the present, where the men's national team still have a campaign to see out.
History tells us that interest levels tend not to be hectic once Ireland's chances of qualification are ground into the dust.
For Ireland's last game of Euro 2024 qualification away to Netherlands - Stephen Kenny's last competitive game in charge - all bar one of the TV screens in the large pub in which I watched the game were showing Leinster-Scarlets from the RDS (and a URC game it was too, not the Champions Cup).
I can proudly say I was one of just 21,700 souls who attended Ireland's 3-1 win over Kazakhstan in the final game of World Cup 2014 qualification and thereby missed the most notable event of the evening - Noel King's post-match interview with Tony O'Donoghue.
Nonetheless, there is invariably a healthy travelling contingent of Irish supporters - Heimir was privately said to be stunned by the size of the away crowd for the Nations League game in Helsinki 12 months ago.
Temperatures are set to hit 27 degrees and they will presumably enjoy the weekend in the Portuguese capital, regardless of the result.
Heimir's official inquiry into the Armenia disaster concluded that the players all played crap for reasons yet unknown. He floated a few possibilities such as the heat, the pitch, the flight, fatigue from the previous game.
The manager said he "took responsibility" for the result and performance, albeit in a slightly abstract 'well-I-suppose-the-buck-stops-here' kind of way. He couldn't identify anything he'd have personally done differently.
"It's unusual for a coach. It's normal to have one or two or three players not playing their best. But I don't think anybody can say, 'I had a good game against Armenia'.
"So overall, was it the coach? We don't see what we did wrong."
These comments were taken as evidence by some that Heimir was preparing the ground for a shift in messaging.
That he was falling back on the by-now familiar 'look at these players, FFS!!' mantra, an argument embraced by many of his predecessors as the lights began to dim on their time in charge.
To be fair to Heimir, it is not an avenue he has gone down entirely. Following his press conference in Yerevan, he implored the journalists not to go too hard on the players, indicating that their confidence was fragile.
This was a continuation of a core theme of Heimir's reign. That this team's psyche has been shattered in some way, that they are scarred by too many defeats.
It would also be slightly awkward for him to proclaim that the players are too limited, given his bullish posture in advance of the Hungary game. In retrospect, that rhetoric looks more like a psychological gambit aimed at encouraging his players to grow into the jersey.
The furthest Heimir would go this week was admitting that we lacked "different" midfielders, ie, that our midfielders were all too samey.
He also suggested there was a dearth of leadership in the side in Armenia, hence his decision to bring back Seamus Coleman and John Egan, the latter of whom hasn't featured since Stephen Kenny's departure.
The debate about how good or otherwise the players are has been raging since time immemorial.
The fans and much of the media are usually positioned among the romantics, arguing that the creative artists in our ranks - whether that be Glenn Hoddle or Weso - aren't being given enough latitude or aren't being picked. The manager of the day usually pegs himself as a pragmatist, telling the utopians that they haven't considered unintended consequences, such as 'who's tracking back?'
The 'we don't have the players' debate really got going in the modern era during Giovanni Trapattoni's reign.
The public were initially jubilant at Trap's appointment, given his star-power and name recognition, though this curdled over time as it became apparent how little he trusted the players. He imposed a rigid and highly negative tactical straitjacket on the team, though this wouldn't have surprised any of the anoraks who recalled his period in charge of his native country a few years earlier.
Trap seemed to regard the arrival of new, up-and-coming players as a headache rather than a boost, as if conscious that he was going to face a clamour from annoying fans demanding their new favourite's immediate inclusion in the team.
Trapattoni decided on his favoured starting XI very early in his reign and thereafter needed overwhelming evidence to consider changing it - injury aside.
His conservatism was such that he refused to take PFAI Young Player of the Year nominee Coleman to Euro 2012.
The Andy Reid saga in 2008/09 kick-started the phenomenon whereby the quickest way for one's stock to rise was to be excluded from a few squads.
This would dwindle when said player was belatedly brought back into the squad and had played a few games, whereupon the desperate fanbase would alight on another exiled cause celebre as the answer to all our problems.
Martin O'Neill, currently preoccupied with his long-standing vendetta against Keith Andrews, became an energetic proponent of the idea that we didn't have the players, particularly as things went south in his final year in charge.
O'Neill, who had experienced giddy highs in 2015 and 2016 as Ireland defeated Germany, Bosnia, Italy and Austria in competitive matches, bluntly announced following the loss to Wales in late 2018 that "we lack quality."
He did have access to some quality that year in the form of Declan Rice, though he seemed reluctant to tie him down.
In subsequent Talksport interviews, O'Neill has generally given the impression that he would have struggled to sleep at night had he condemned the lad to an international career in the green shirt. That he didn't want such a thing on his conscience.
Stephen Kenny was the only Ireland manager to eschew the 'we don't have the players' excuse, largely because his whole philosophy and mission was bound up with the idea that we did have the players.
Instead, it was his supporters among the fanbase who were reluctantly forced to push the idea in the wake of Ireland's debacle in Athens, an ironic outcome given that many in this constituency had been to the fore in giving O'Neill pelters for implying as much five years earlier.
Heimir has so far resisted the temptation to harp on the players' limitations. With defeat likely against Portugal and another tense night against Armenia following hot on its heels, his resolve to maintain that approach may well be tested.
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