Thirty years, eh? It’s been a while.

I know where I was on the afternoon of 25 June 1990, and I’d bet cash money that a couple of million Irish people can say the same. Three decades on, I’m thinking about a very specific memory: a frozen moment that was plastered across the length and breadth of Ireland for months and years after the event in which it happened.

I’m thinking about that image and why it feels so enduringly important.

So, thirty years ago, on the afternoon of 25 June 1990, I was mostly…

…hiding behind my parents’ sofa.

Ireland was playing Romania in the round of sixteen at the World Cup, having first miraculously qualified for the tournament, and then ultra-miraculously got through the group stage.

The country was drunk on soccer.

(And – let’s be honest – in many cases, also booze. Not me, though: I was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, who wouldn’t even try to get served in a pub for at least another year. I know, right? Look at my angelic face. Virtue is its own reward.)

I wasn’t particularly into football, actually, but the 1990 World Cup was a big deal in Ireland, and so I was watching this match. If we won, we’d advance to the quarter-finals.

It was nail-biting. The score after extra time stood at 0-0, which meant the match had to be decided by that cruel ordeal, the penalty shootout.

I hid behind our fat floral sofa, gripping a piped edge and peering out as each shot was taken.

It’s almost impossible to save a penalty. The goalie has to make a micro-second decision on which way to jump as the striker kicks. Guess right, and you’ve got a tiny chance of stopping the ball. Guess wrong, and you’re toast.

Goal after goal after goal, the score climbed to 4-4.

(“Me nerves!!!” exclaimed everyone in Ireland.)

Then the fifth Romanian player – Daniel Timofte, interjects Uncle Google helpfully – stepped up and took his shot, and the Irish goalie, Packie Bonner from Donegal, read it right, got his gloved hands to the ball, and pushed it away. David O’Leary then sent the final shot singing into the back of the net, clinching victory for Ireland.

So we won 5-4 on penalties and went on to the quarter-finals (and a 1-0 loss to Italy; oh well).

It’s difficult to overestimate the effect of this win on the Irish public.

“Euphoria” doesn’t begin to cover it. It was national delirium. You could even argue that it was among the catalysts of the economic and social transformation this country underwent in the 1990s. It opened something. In a very real sense, you had to be there.

(Mind you, if you just want to watch the penalty shootout, you can, because we are living in the future now and nothing is lost. My kids have seen it, although they weren’t even born in the same century as that match. They can sing “We’re All Part of Jackie’s Army”, too. It’s disconcerting.)

Dedicated Irish fans can tell the tale of the Romania match in loving detail. But even lukewarm supporters like me remember that save – that beautiful, impossible save.

Over in a split-second, it turned Packie Bonner into a national hero. By contrast, in 1991 I met some Romanian teenagers: his was the only Irish name they knew, and they spat it out like a curse.

The still image of the save featured later in a poster ad campaign for some bank (save, geddit?) – captured just as Bonner punches the ball clear: he lies horizontal in the air, a foot or two above the grass. Heroic. Gravity-defying. Breathtaking.

As I said, I’m not much of a football fan, and this clearly isn’t a sports blog. It’s a blog about creativity, the human impulse to make art.

So why am I writing about this?

It’s that image: Packie Bonner, suspended in mid-save.

Total commitment.

Total focus.

Total presence.

A human being flinging their whole self (here, literally) into what they’re doing. The sheer exuberant vulnerable humanity of it.

And here comes my point: That’s also the way to make good art.

And here comes my other point: Success or failure is irrelevant – the thing is to commit.

Because the other thing I remember is this:

Packie Bonner flung himself just as hard each time he failed.

We don’t see stills of him letting in the first four Romanian penalties, but if we did, they’d show him in the same aspect, lying sideways on thin air, hands outstretched, striving.

So I’m wondering, how can I fling myself more fully at what I want to enact in the world?

For that matter, how can you?