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At 3am they couldn’t get any more drink in town and walked to Stormont to begin the vigil.

They didn’t have a camp, but they were camping out. Under his black stubble Simon’s face had the ghoulish pallor of drink and sleeplessness. On a day such as this it was a face that fitted.

Imre Rewcastle travelled from Kilmarnock on Thursday and stayed in a hostel in town. A mother of two grown-up children, she wasn’t a football fan, and she had no childhood memories of Best, but she was writing a book on destiny and “in the last few weeks George folded into my story”.

For others the connection with Best was more straightforward but no less magical. John Hamill from north Belfast was seven when his uncle Francie McShane called him into the house one Saturday afternoon.

BBC Grandstand was showing a couple of minutes of Best, and Francie wanted his nephew to see. “ ‘You sit down here, son’, he said to me, ‘and watch a genius at work’. Those two minutes changed my life.”

Trawling the avenue yesterday there was nobody whose affection for Best had been stained by the life he led after football, and the curse of a slow death that he had helped to bring upon himself.

In people’s minds there was a clear separation between the two periods of his life. William Dawson came under Best’s spell watching Northern Ireland as a schoolboy in Windsor Park and that was the George he choose to remember: “I only think of him as a footballer, nothing else. All the rest of his life, that was private.”

“Maybe,” said Andy Gilligan, “when he got the second chance with the liver transplant he should have . . .” And then he checked himself, unable to judge or condemn. “That was just George, you can’t change the man you are.”

The people that came to celebrate knew about the life he had led. People preferred to think kindly and smile.

“Somebody asked Rodney Marsh a couple of years ago if David Beckham was a better player than George,” said Malachy Keegan. “ ‘He probably is,’ said Marsh, ‘but George is 57’.”

It was cold and wet on the lawns of Stormont as the ceremony in the Great Hall was carried on the giant screens. Every singer and speaker was applauded.

Then George Best’s son, Calum, read a poem that had been given to him by a woman in Belfast on Friday night. All around you could see people fumble quietly for a hankie.

At this funeral, though, tears were an imposter. The funeral cortege returned to the avenue and the applause started again.

In death as in life.

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