Aficionados came to this year’s Cheltenham Festival hoping to celebrate in Champion Hurdle contestant Constitution Hill a super-horse, a horse being spoken of after only five races as a potential Arkle. We left exhilarated by the exploits of three.

Looking at Constitution Hill in a field of grazers, you would not pick him out as an obvious star. As his owner Michael Buckley told me two days after his triumph in the Champion Hurdle: ‘He wouldn’t win a trot in the indoor school.’ He just eats, sleeps and wins races. Says trainer Nicky Henderson: ‘We worry about him but he doesn’t worry about anything.’ As for the future, ‘You could jump a fence, you could go three miles… He has had six races now and barely come off the bridle.’ What we forget when these superstars come along is the responsibility that goes with being their custodian. Nicky has done it before with the likes of See You Then, Altior and Sprinter Sacre but the task is still like carrying a precious artefact across an ice rink. As he puts it: ‘You find yourself being the minder of a piece of public property.’

But if Constitution Hill provided the wow factor, it was the mare Honeysuckle who gave us a feelgood supercharge. Twice previously, Honeysuckle had won Champion Hurdles for trainer Henry de Bromhead and rider Rachael Blackmore, along with 16 other victories. This time, after two defeats that suggested she was in decline, she was running her final race instead in the hottest mares’ hurdle ever run. She came to the last in the lead, was passed on the run-in but fought back tenaciously to win. It is not, though, the race that those of us there will remember for years to come so much as the scenes afterwards around the winners’ enclosure. The crowd knew the unbearable sorrow the De Bromhead family had suffered last year when 13-year-old Jack de Bromhead died in a pony-racing accident, and when her trainer and connections welcomed back the winning mare, Cheltenham erupted in often tearful celebration, wrapping the family in a cathartic collective multi-hug. As Henry de Bromhead put it: ‘You dream of the fairy-tale ending but so often it doesn’t happen.’ Being the considerate man he is he reflected too: ‘The support we get is ridiculous. We’re so lucky. There are so many people in our situation who don’t see this support.’

With Ireland once again triumphant, winning 18 of the 28 Festival races, and with Willie Mullins collecting six of them, the third truly significant success of the week was that of his Gold Cup winner Galopin Des Champs who came home clear of the best field we have seen for years. ‘Sport is about Redemption,’ as owner Rich Ricci said of another Festival winner and it was fitting consolation for Galopin’s topple at the final obstacle at the previous Festival.

Among Galopin’s opponents in the next Gold Cup we can expect to see The Real Whacker, whose victory in the Brown Advisory Novices’ Chase was chalked down as an English success because trainer Patrick Neville’s 20-horse yard is in Yorkshire. In fact, he moved over only last year after struggling to find owners in Ireland and rented a barn from Ann Duffield. The celebrations that followed The Real Whacker’s third victory this season around the Cheltenham course had a distinctly Irish flavour, with former jockey Paddy ‘Mad’ Merrigan leaping around like an inflated leprechaun shouting to the world that he had been tipping the horse for six months and had cleaned out the bookies.

This time of year often leaves me feeling that it would have been more fun to be born Irish and there was as much intensity if rather less noise about the success of Barry Connell, a man who knows his way around a spread sheet and a hedge-fund roster as well as he does around a stable yard. The former stockbroker-turned-owner-turned-amateur rider-turned-trainer says of horses: ‘They are magical creatures that cast a spell over you.’ He brought two to the Festival and admitted, after winning the Supreme Hurdle with Marine Nationale: ‘I told every Irish person on the boat over to back the two horses. I would have had to put on a disguise going home if he had got beat.’

Renowned handicap expert Tony Martin was literally trembling with excitement after his Good Time Jonny won the Pertemps Network Final Handicap Hurdle, his first Festival success since 2015, and I had to thank Milton Harris, trainer of our Twelve to Follow star Scriptwriter, for getting on at 10-1. Five minutes before the off Milton had told me: ‘I’ve heard that Tony Martin has one plotted up for the Pertemps.’ Since he had put £1,000 each way on Scriptwriter for the Triumph Hurdle just before a lacklustre run at Kempton ruled his own big hope out of Cheltenham, I just hope that Milton, too, had his money on Good Time Jonny.