Now might be a good time, England, to talk about not getting your hopes up. I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade, or take the gloss off a deserved qualification. I've just seen you get this excited before and well, you can sometimes get a little, y'know, carried away.
A couple of wins and you're making hats and T-shirts with "Campione!" written on them, blowing your newly bought vuvuzelas and anointing yourselves favourites. Down this road madness lies; and a madness you should have enough experience of by now.
I know this boundless optimism has been given enough time to percolate. It's a strange, temporal illusion, international football. Tournaments have been appearing biennially for at least 40 years now. But, Jesus, the qualifications seem to get longer and longer. I blame the Champions League. We've space in our heads for a couple of different sporting time scales. The weekly ding-dong of the league, the fortnightly European super-brands, the FA Cup once a month; that's as many plates as I can keep in the air at one time.
Grinding along in its tectonic way, and popping up pretty much at random, I'd hazard a guess that most of you only realised it was international week when you saw your club had a weekend free. And for most of us it's not over yet. Ireland will almost certainly have at least four more matches to play to see if we get to Copa Mundial '10. When are they? Who knows. They'll just appear randomly, like an outbreak of swine flu.
At least our expectations will be healthy, though. Your history denies you a luxury we Irish have. Having never won the World Cup, we don't feel any grief about not winning it since. All qualifications are a bonus, all victories in the finals an explosion of national joy.
A lack of expectation is a wonderful thing sometimes. You should try watching Wimbledon, without having won it 70 years ago. It's a very enjoyable fortnight of tennis.
I remember, as a child, watching a grim kids show on British telly called Runaround. It was the late Mike Reid who hosted it, a bizarre piece of casting for an earthy cockney club comic and future EastEnders star. It would be like a kids show these days hosted by Frankie Boyle. Or a Dalek.
In Runaround, the young contestants would race to one of three big circles on the floor to show that they wanted to answer 1, 2 or 3 to a quiz question. Then, for no apparent reason, Reid would roar "Runaround!" like the villain from a Guy Ritchie movie.
The children, petrified, would scatter and with all memory of the question blown away by fear of the host, they'd pick a circle at random, to cower like a shoal of fish. And then they'd get eliminated.
Supporting England must be like that. There are two big circles, one marked Bloody Shower and the other, Best in the World! After every match a cockney roars the result and the entire population has to choose between the two before the music stops. Only beating Andorra by a couple of goals! Run to the bad circle! We've stuffed the Croats! Run to the good circle!
There is a small third circle, by the way, much overlooked. It's the sensible, empirical circle. Only a few people ever fit into it, but it's the smart choice because, by and large, England's international journey is much more dull and predictable than the rollercoaster of public emotion would let on.
In the Fifa world rankings England are pretty much always between fifth and eighth. These are the quarter?final positions. And bar the McClaren Debacle, that's where you've been reaching. A series of quarter-finals. England have performed exactly according to the rankings.
Again, in this World Cup, the rankings have been pretty much spot on. England qualified two games ahead of schedule. A fine achievement. But so did Brazil and Holland and Spain.
England qualified winning all eight games. As indeed have Holland and Spain. Not lagging far behind, Germany had seven wins with one draw, Russia seven wins and one defeat. These are all teams in the top six above England.
Things are pretty much panning out the way the rankings predicted with most of the big hitters making stately progress. One of the only exceptions are the perennial drama queens Italy, and they have had to contend with the mighty Irish.
Really, they should probably just print "Spoiler Alert!" all over the Fifa website. It'll be a wonderful Brazil v Spain final, though. And you should all take pride in another great quarter-final.
