For sheer gut-wrenching tension, there is nothing quite like the final pool round of the Heineken Cup. From the steaming mists of Thomond Park one night to Twickenham's hyper state of drop goal suspension the next, the annual Judgement Weekend put everyone through the emotional wringer as only it knows how.
The desire to reach the promised land of the quarter-finals drove some to dredge up powers of resistance they probably never knew they had, a few to fall excruciatingly short and, one, Northampton, to endure a fraught 24 hours before sparing the English Premiership from being wiped off the map of Europe.
For the Ospreys, the unrelenting drama turned out to be such a hairy experience that they lost temporary track of the generally accepted principle that Rugby Union is a 15-a-side game.
No club spent longer at the epicentre of the final qualifying storm than Northampton. When Munster's pack went into reverse gear and Paul O'Connell sat in the sin-bin going into the last quarter in Limerick on Friday night, the Saints had Pool 1 by the throat. Instead Munster, with flanker Alan Quinlan and substitute Donncha Ryan locking a makeshift
scrum, found something from heaven knows where to turn the tide and show that real champions still win on nights when they do enough to lose. Instead of going into the quarter finals as No. 5 seeds, Northampton grabbed the last place by the skin of their teeth thanks to
London Irish suffering the cruellest of fates, even if it was largely of their own making. The sight of Chris Malone twice failing in the last seconds to land the drop goal against Leinster to put Irish through instead would have reduced the Saints to jibbering wrecks.
Any team capable of beating Munster by a single point, 40-39, over two legs as they did deserves a lucky break or two. For that reason, and Irish's pitiful collapse which rendered their trip to Llanelli the previous week utterly pointless,
Northampton have every right to be going back to Thomond. Next time, surely, they will play with more ambition knowing hey have the scrum to shunt Munster, the No. 1 seeds, into big trouble.
No top seed has ever gone on to win the trophy which will make Munster think there has to be a first time for everything while the quarter-final seedings brought further confirmation that the Ospreys' luck has changed. Biarritz's bonus-point win over Glasgow diverted the Welsh region away from a more dangerous trip to Ireland to San Sebastian instead and an eminently winnable tie against the erratic Basques. They will have a better chance there in April of clinching a semi-final on Welsh soil against Munster or Northampton than in Dublin or Limerick.
That Dylan Hartley's rapidly improving Saints are the sole English survivor is no surprise. From the halfway stage, it was always likely that no Premiership team would go through as a pool winner which makes this the worst season in the Heineken for England's clubs since their boycott of the event eleven seasons ago.
Clermont Auvergne, the best of the four French qualifiers, must go to Dublin while the worst, Stade Francais, travel to Toulouse.
Never before under the current scoring system introduced six years ago has anyone reached the last eight with as few as Stade's 18 points. That they got that many via a losing bonus point against Edinburgh will not make Leicester feel any better.
They had a better pool record than Stade, scoring more than twice as many tries over the six games in collecting the same number of points only to finish third which denied them even the tiniest consolation of staying in Europe via the Amlin Challenge Cup.
