The first Nitro athletics meet ended with Usain Bolt and his teammates standing atop the podium on the edge of the field at Lakeside Stadium. Disco lights flashed behind him as Bolt held aloft the winners' trophy. He then sang Queen's We are the Champions into the microphone as friend-host-Athletics Australia board member John Steffensen was lavish in his hugs.
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Bolt's team had won the event built around his almighty presence. It was no great surprise.
With Asafa Powell and Bolt running the first two legs of the night's final event - the mixed 4x100m relay - for the All-Stars, they overtook Australia at the death. That made it a clean sweep of all three nights. They edged the home team 1030 points to 1018 for the night, and finished four points ahead of Australia on the final overall standings (24 points to 20).
Those facts will quickly subside into the ether though.
More importantly, big-time athletics in Australia was back. The kids on hand could tell their grandkids they'd watched the great man.
One "kid" got closer than most though. On the final night, the winners of the two 150m races were Bolt and Riley Day. That's Bolt, 30, eight-time Olympic gold medallist, among the handful of greatest athletes of all time, the reason why this event was sold out, perhaps the reason this meet happened at all. And that's Day, 16, from a town of 6000 in Queensland.
The men's race was Bolt's sole individual event of the series, and he paced home to win in a time of 15.28 seconds, 0.16 seconds ahead of New Zealand's Joseph Millar, with Australian Alex Hartmann fourth. The women's race was next. In her two individual runs earlier in the series, Day had run second to 200m Olympic semi-finalist Jenna Prandini, and world championship 4x100m gold medallist Natasha Morrison, both representing the All-Stars.
On Saturday night, Day was again up against Morrison, while also facing off with Englishwoman Margaret Adeoye, another Olympic semi-finalist. Day beat them both, winning in a time of 17.63 seconds, with Adeoye second (17.78) and Morrison third (17.82).
A week earlier, Day had made headlines when she raced against Bolt in the mixed 4x100m relay. Much like the rest of this high-energy series, that was noteworthy for its novelty value. But the fuss made about that mightn't have done justice to Day's quality. In toppling runners of proven international quality on Saturday, Day showed that the future of Australian athletics might be arriving faster than expected.
"I'm speechless," she said afterwards.
"I was not expecting that to be honest. I was just trying to catch the girls in front of me, and keep the girls behind me, behind me.
"Just to be running against all these wonderful women, it's just an honour."
Soon she would be sitting next to Bolt being interviewed on national television, even indulging in banter.
She realised how fortunate she was. "From school sports to this. Nitro is the best thing to come into the world. I love Nitro. It's an amazing experience," Day said.
"I'm incredibly lucky and to be coming from a small town in Queensland, be 16 years old, being against all these Olympians and world champions, it's awesome."
Day is immensely talented. And if Nitro's success can be sustained, she should have many more amazing nights ahead.
