HISTORY AT STORMONT: IRELAND STUN T20 WORLD CHAMPIONS, INDIA

Some results don't just go into the scorebooks. They become folklore. On a sun-baked Friday at Stormont, an Ireland side, missing many of its first-choice players, did what no Irish team had ever done before: beat India. And it wasn’t just any Indian team. This was the Indian team that successfully defended its T20 World Champions’ crown earlier this year. Fresh off their global triumph, the blue-shirts walked out under newly-anointed captain Shreyas Iyer for the very first time and they walked straight into a 34-run ambush.

Eight previous T20I meetings, eight defeats for Ireland. Going into the Ninth fixture, India came in as red-hot favourites in front of a Stormont crowd that had sold out three times over, much of it decked in blue. This was supposed to be a coronation tour. Instead, it became Irish cricket's most famous afternoon.

The story of how the Irish got over the line only makes it sweeter. Ireland's "first-choice" XI barely exists right now. Paul Stirling, Mark Adair, Josh Little, Curtis Campher, Barry McCarthy and Jordan Neill - that's six senior regulars - fell to injuries in one cruel window. 

New captain Lorcan Tucker was handed a patched-up, injury-ravaged squad and told to go and measure himself against the best team on the planet. He did much more than that.

Ireland stumbled to 36 for 3 inside the powerplay, and for a while it looked like the script everyone expected to read. Then Tucker dug in deep, alongside Gareth Delany, the pair grinding through what the captain himself likened to a Test-match passage of play before Delany cut loose, taking three sixes off one over alone. Tucker's own fifty, his third in as many innings as skipper, anchored Ireland to a defendable 182 for 9.

Defendable became unforgettable once the ball was in hand. Two uncapped quicks, thrown into the deep end against the world champions on debut, delivered the kind of performance dressing rooms dream about. Jai Moondra, Indian-born, facing players from the country he was born in, with friends and family in the stands holding up signs declaring that anything was possible with him around, struck with his very first ball in international cricket as Sanju Samson dragged a delivery onto his stumps. Matt Hollard, on just his second delivery in the format, had Ishan Kishan caught behind. And he didn't stop there - going on to bag three wickets, including the prized scalp of Indian skipper Shreyas, which earned him the Player of the Match award. Matthew Humphreys mopped up the tail to cap off a famous win for Ireland. India were bundled out for 148. Game, and history, to Ireland.

A ground built for around 5,000 had been begging for three times that many tickets, the bulk of the noise arriving in blue and expecting a procession. By the close of play, it was the Irish green doing the celebrating, and Tucker made sure to credit the occasion itself. 

"The energy today was fabulous, the crowd were brilliant," the Ireland captain said after the match.

For everyone working to grow this game across Ireland, Scotland and the Netherlands, days like this are sweet experiences to savour - it feels like the ultimate reward. The current international cricket calendar doesn’t have room for too many encounters with elite powerhouses for teams like Ireland. Which is why it becomes almost imperative for the emerging cricketing nations to make any and every opportunity count. And made it count, the Irish did. For a side outside of the top 10 rankings, shorn of half its first-choice attack, taking down a colossus, a World Champion side with an army of heaving Blue brigade behind them in Belfast. This is precisely the kind of story that inspires a whole new generation to flock through the turnstiles and also dream of wielding willow and leather on their own hallowed grounds some day.

Ireland will now be aiming for something almost impossible to fathom - a historic series sweep - when the same two sides return to Stormont on Sunday.