RED tints in the sky again.  Whooping voices.  You are in a room that is full of routinely unemotional men, now cast adrift on a sea of giddiness.

But you?  You are blue in a world of crimson.  Tony Sage, the Everton kitman, keeps sending texts.  You scan them furtively, his words snapping against the current of the evening.  Tony's gutted. "Don't f****** believe this."  Every time your mobile bleats, you know it's Tony slipping closer to meltdown.

So you're sitting in this hotel room in Portmarnock.  And every face around you is alive with the daftness of Liverpool's journey.  Three down to AC Milan at half-time; champions of Europe an hour and a half later.

Kevin Kilbane is still trying to fathom how, at the very death, Liverpool stole Everton's thunder.  For months, they both courted that fourth spot in the Premiership, as if it held the solution to every imperfection.  The stress of it corroded people.  Both sides gasped and wheezed.

But Everton got there.  Finished above their neighbours for what felt like the first time since Gladstone was Prime Minister.  Better still, squeezed them out of the Champions League.

Unless you're from the blue half of Merseyside, unless you've lived through the barbed necklace of seemingly endless relegation fights, you could not countenance what that meant.

"Everybody saw it," Kilbane says quietly, as if referring to the forensics of a bank raid.  "It was the most unbelievable game I've ever seen.  Liverpool were dead and buried.  You're thinking it could become six or seven.  Milan were just playing some amazing football.  The way it changed was truly amazing.  I imagine it left half of Merseyside in tears."

His half.  It's not Kilbane's way to be resentful.  He is pleasant and open and, on all evidence, utterly immune to the virus of spite that infects great prairies of his profession.  But Liverpool in the box seat again?  Just after Everton had finally slipped their shadow?

He can't help but think of the Goodison faces.  The dressing room pivots.  Guys like Alan Stubbs and Tony Hibbert and big Duncan Ferguson.  Men so attuned to the club, they all but bleed in blue trickles.  It doesn't take much imagining to understand what Jerzy Dudek's final save un-corked within them.

Kilbane would never pretend to be like that, to be part of the Everton masonry.  He's been at the club only since September of 2003, a £1M purchase from Sunderland that beat the transfer window deadline by two minutes.  It was a bit of a rush job.  David Moyes had failed in bids for Sean Davis and Barry Ferguson.  He was fighting the clock.  Sunderland were fighting the bailiff.  They needed to cut their wage bill.  It happened.

Yet now, when he drives to Everton's training ground at Bellefield, Kilbane feels like this club is his fate.  He's felt it from the first day.  There's a tightness to the people.  A humility.  No-one is a stranger.

He knew Moyes from his apprenticeship days at Preston, but this was never going to be a blithe or presumptuous re-union.  The day he signed, Moyes just told Kilbane that he would have to prove himself in the Premiership.  And he has.  Maybe better than many imagined he could.

Everton were a revelation in the opening half of the season just ended, dumfounding those who sensed that the sale of Wayne Rooney to Manchester United would precipitate a collapse.  Then, in mid-term, Thomas Gravesen was sold to Real Madrid.  And, thereafter, they fell into capricious ways.

Kilbane believes his own form was a mirror of the team's.  Bright and authoritative up to Christmas.  Unpredictable thereafter.  What Everton had, though, was a rare glue in the dressing room.  They could dredge up a performance when least expected.

The Goodison victory over Rooney and United had an almost primal feel, Gary Neville and Paul Scholes both being sent off and big Dunc heading the only goal.  But that was their Doctor Jekyll.  They'd sooner forget the sins of Mister Hyde.

In their penultimate game, Champions League qualification already assured, they went to Highbury and got plucked like plump turkeys.  Shipped seven goals and never got even close to a retort.  What happened?

"Don't know," he smiles, sheepishly.  "Probably too many lads in party mode.  Aaah, it was an unbelievable night.  We got absolutely slaughtered.  It was embarrassing.  Let ourselves down."

The following weekend, they lost 3-2 to Bolton, a tumultuous season petering out in a timid shuffle. "It felt like we'd been relegated," says Kilbane of the emotion afterwards.

The story can be found on the Irish Independent's website at - http://www.unison.ie/sportsdesk/stories.php3?ca=12&si=1410369 - registration is required.