As Troy Parrott scored the three vital goals to push Ireland into the World Cup play-offs, manager Heimir Hallgrimsson urged the nation to use this moment to grow Irish football.
After a remarkable 3-2 victory in Budapest, the manager was happy to make an exception to his usual rule of not singling out players, and spoke of Parrott's quality and resilience to be there at the death to secure that vital goal.
But Hallgrimsson believes the team is on an upward trajectory and it needs to be used to the benefit of the domestic game after beating Portugal on Thursday and following it up with another victory in beating Hungary.
"It's difficult not to give credit to a player that scores three goals in an important game like this one," said the manager, when asked about the hat-trick here.
"I normally don't take players out of the equation, but it's difficult at this stage not to talk about him scoring two goals against Portugal and three goals today.
"It's difficult, but for me it's always about the team, and not only scoring goals, he's really hard-working in both these games, and to have the energy to finish off the second 90-minute match he's playing, coming back from injury just shows he's in a good place and he deserves this."
"I think this moment shouldn't be about finding heroes," he added. "It should be this team, this spirit, this unity, this hard work that the guys showed. I talked about before the game, this spiral this team is in.
"Now or the next game, we'll be bigger than this one. Portugal was big, this was bigger. The next one will be even bigger.
"If we win, the next one will be even bigger. So it's a moment where we should think about where we are. And this is a possibility to grow.
"From this on, we can help both this team, Irish football, the federation, and if we qualify for the World Cup, things might change big time. So that's what we are hoping."
Looking back at the game, the manager said he felt that Hungary were the better team, especially in the first half but they only have themselves to blame as they had no time to respond following Parrott’s late, late winner.
"This was not a special football match, but how it played out was kind of funny, because they wasted their own time in the end," said Hallgrimsson.
"They didn't have a chance, like we talked about in the pre-match. I don't care if we scored in the last minute, then it's more difficult to equalise.
"So it just materialised. They wasted their own time in the end. That's kind of funny."
Reflecting on the campaign, Hallgrimsson was asked about the journey from losing in Armenia to ending the six-game process with a place in the play-offs and whether he had any doubts about getting to this place.
"Obviously, at that stage, we were so far off from what we expected. It was just a bad performance. And that's football as well," he said.
"You never know when you will have your bad moment. But it was difficult to think at that time that we would do something like this.
"But I think there's a big growth, both individually and the team in how they believe in what we are doing, they believe in each other.
"There's more and more quicker decision-making, quicker reaction, etc. We were unhappy with the beginning, but gladly, we corrected it."
And the manager took time to think about those players who have helped the team reach this stage who are missing from the squad through injury or competition for places.
"Just imagine all the players that are not with us now, all the players that are injured, that would have liked to be here.
"We're so rich in numbers of players that can play here, we think of them now as well as part of this squad.
"Now we need to use this moment, and continue improving and continuing growing, because the games will become bigger and bigger."
Listen to the RTÉ Soccer podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
