PORTRUSH (Northern Ireland) • A happy story played out in sad-story weather on an exuberant Sunday of good spirits and other spirits at Royal Portrush.

It reiterated the time-honoured idea that heartbreak plus time can equal strength.

It retold of golf's mad fickleness in that it happened 12 months after an Irish golfer wept in a Scottish car park.

Somehow that same Irishman, Shane Lowry, walked the 72nd hole as a delirious crowd cheered the new British Open champion. A controlled and efficient one-over final round of 72 gave him a 15-under 269 and victory by six strokes over Tommy Fleetwood of England.

While an emotional Lowry admitted that he "couldn't believe it was happening to me", he was quick to remind his audience as he lifted the Claret Jug that golf was "fickle".

Only a year ago, he was in despair in the car park at Carnoustie Golf Links in Scotland.

He was on his way to missing his fourth straight cut at the Open after an opening 74 and had decided he needed to separate from his long-time caddie Dermot Byrne.

"I cried," Lowry, who now has Brian Martin on the bag, said matter-of-factly on Sunday. "Golf wasn't my friend at the time.

"It was something that became very stressful, it was weighing on me and I just didn't like doing it. And look, what a difference a year makes, I suppose."

His timing was certainly impeccable. The Open had not been held in Northern Ireland since Royal Portrush staged the Major in 1951, but Lowry navigated the long-awaited opportunity brilliantly in all kinds of weather.

As the thunderous support over the weekend made clear, this was a unifying moment for the Irish, even if the locals would surely have found a victory by an Ulsterman like Rory McIlroy or Graeme McDowell to be the perfect ending.

Still, it was quite a symbolic finish and quite a breakthrough moment for Lowry, whose talent has been widely apparent since he won the Irish Open as an amateur in similarly nasty weather in 2009, as he became the first Irish golfer to secure the Major since back-to-back titles for Padraig Harrington in 2007 and 2008.

No player shot under par in the final 12 pairings on Sunday, which made the world No. 33's round of one-over "even more impressive".

Fleetwood said: "It was Shane's time, Shane's week, fair play... the last three or four holes were kind of a bit of a procession for Shane, and he did great."

Recalling his missed cut at last year's Open and how he had fumbled a four-shot lead with 18 holes to play at the 2016 US Open at Oakmont Country Club, Lowry claimed he would savour the moment for life as "you never know what's around the corner".

He added: "That's why you need to remind yourself, and you need others there to remind you. You need to fight through the bad times.

"That's what helped me, that's where I struggled in Oakmont. I always said after Oakmont, if I could have got the last four holes back, I'd give anything to be standing on the 14th fairway again.

"So I knew today that I was going to have to fight to the very end, and I did."

NYTIMES, WASHINGTON POST