In a week that began with the eventual winner questioning the meaning of it all, there was great purpose in the way the first arriving fans flooded through the gates and on to the course after word spread that McIlroy had snuck out for a practice round at the earliest available opportunity.
Those first holes on Monday, and his stints watching chunks of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer between rounds, must have felt like the briefest slices of quiet for the most recent member of golf’s Grand Slam club.
At all other points around Royal Portrush, galleries thronged around the Holywood star, the roars that greeted each of his made putts reverberating across the links.
While his walk off the 18th green was without the Claret Jug, the love for the returning hero, playing at home for the first time since his Masters victory, was a far more fitting conclusion to his week than the tearful missed cut back in 2019.
But it was not just McIlroy who sparked adoration. Americans Bryson DeChambeau and Jordan Spieth, as well as England’s Tommy Fleetwood, were among other huge draws obliging as many requests for selfies and autographs as time allowed, while the thump of children’s feet along grandstands as players neared with golf balls sounded like the promised thunder.
So keen were others to take home a souvenir of their week by more conventional means, queues for the merchandise tent snaked round multiple sets of barriers with one visitor reportedly spending £13,000 in one transaction.
Others were content with more transitory pleasures. On Padraig Harrington’s insistence that Royal Portrush had the best ice creams on The Open rota, there seemed general agreement after what was surely a record number of 99s consumed up and down the links.
A more uniquely Northern Irish staple – the fifteen traybake – proved more divisive in the media centre.
The coconut-based treat was not all that failed to gain universal popularity. Jason Day was left confounded by local weather forecasts as the week proved true the old cliche about Northern Ireland featuring all four seasons in one day, while marathon rounds on Thursday left a few players grumbling about bottlenecks on the course.
Those that took the time to look around as they waited, though, were rewarded with the spectacular views that make Portrush such a memorable course for the hacker and world’s best player alike.
“It’s one of the coolest views that I’ve seen in the game of golf, to be honest with you,” said Scheffler of the course’s signature hole Calamity Corner.
“We were kind of looking out. It was a day in which you had a bunch of rain and there was rainbows on the other side, and you’re looking out over the golf course on the right, and you’ve got the huge bluffs by the ocean and it’s just mounds and hills, and the town is in the distance.”