Just like Jean Van de Velde eight years ago, Padraig Harrington did his best to throw it away.

He did not exactly paddle in the Barry Burn with his trousers rolled up and his embarrassment hanging out for all to see.

But before he threw his arms to the heavens, hugged son Patrick and then collected the Claret Jug in the 136th Open Championship after a play-off with Sergio Garcia, he made us endure another excruciating 18th hole drama.

What is it about the 18th at Carnoustie with the power to scramble the brains of some of the world's best golfers?

Why did Harrington, leading by a shot, pump his drive down the fairway only for the ball to bounce along the bridge and plop into the river which swirls across the fairway?

Why, after taking his drop, did he then deposit his next shot into the same greenside burn as Van de Velde to take a double bogey six?

And why then, with the gates opened to greatness, did Garcia find the green-side bunker and take a bogey of his own when a par would have seen his own name engraved on that precious silver jug?

Adrenaline? Nerves? Pressure?

Perhaps a combination of all three, but, to be sure - as Harrington might have said - they were moments of madness.

''If I'd lost I don't know whether I would have played golf again,'' said Harrington.

Harrington's victory means he is the first European to win a major championship in eight years.

The 136th Open might have been subdued in the first three days but when it needed to put on its Sunday best it did so quite brilliantly.

What a wonderful, exhilarating, frantic, topsy-turvy, thoroughly unbelievable final day Carnoustie supplied.

One in which Garcia squandered a three-stroke lead, in which Argentina's Andres Romero played golf which defied the laws of physics and in which Harrington came with a charge which would have matched the Light Brigade.

Yet you had to feel for Garcia. He had given so much to this tournament. He had led it for three days.

He had displayed charisma and maturity and touches of pure genius but when the play-off came he had no more to give. The famous jug, however, belongs to Ireland.

To a Dubliner with twinkling eyes who took his 'lost at sea' disappointment at the 18th with wonderful good humour as he lifted son Patrick above his shoulders as if to say there are things more precious than a golfing major.

Now, however, he has it all.