CARNOUSTIE, Scotland -- Woulda, coulda and shoulda probably never stood a chance at the 136th British Open. It was a week when reason failed to rhyme, when November came to July, when carnivorous Carnoustie, the brassiest and brawniest of Scottish linksyards, was seen in a cocktail dress and Jimmy Choo heels. Birdies galore, some timely gore -- didn't Hitchcock employ that same combination to equally strong effect?

In golf, the best drama comes not from a script or some cockamamy greenskeeper, but the game's own mischievous whim. It allows a man playing in just his second major championship to stand on the 71st tee with a two-stroke lead before throwing him under the wheels of fate, punctuating perhaps the best final round in this championship's broad history with tire tracks instead of exclamation points. You can ask why, but you'd be wasting your breath.

It teases the best player in the world under the age of 30 -- a dashing Spanish bachelor whose problems grasping the club aren't nearly as significant as his inability to get a grip on Sunday pressure -- by letting him hold the lead all by himself after each of the first three rounds. Only one would-be contender remained within five strokes of that pace at the 54-hole milepost, making this one his to lose before it could be anybody else's to win.

"You have to get it done, but he didn't do anything wrong," insisted the Spaniard's caddie, his eyes still stained with tears. "Not a [bleeping] thing wrong."

It turns competitive justice into a two-way street, destinations to be determined, although Padraig Harrington might want to consider traveling by air the next time he needs to fly a burn. In a tragic-compelling finish that basically offered a rose-colored climax to the Jean Van de Velde fiasco here in 1999, Harrington might well be the first major champion ever to sit six back at the start of the day, trail a different guy by two with five holes to play, then lose two balls on the 18th to finish par-par-double bogey.

OK, so he needed a playoff. Some waits are worth the weight. "I never let myself feel like I'd lost the Open Championship," the jubilant Irishman said of the 15 anxious minutes between his 72nd-hole mess and Sergio Garcia's 10-foot miss for par, which necessitated extra holes. "Obviously I had just thrown it away, and if it had turned out like that, it would have been very hard to take. I think I would have struggled with it in the future."

Instead, the burden falls on Garcia, which is nothing new, although this was a much harder blow to his unprotected psyche than any previous punch that might have drawn blood in the last six years. Since the 2001 U.S. Open, his first shaky Sunday when in contention, Sergio had played in two final groups without a share of the lead -- both alongside Tiger Woods, who would go on to win and leave a fresh set of hoofprints on his young rival's soul.

Convenience-store logic suggested that when Woods wasn't around to terrorize him, Garcia would finally wrap his arms around that elusive maiden major. Last Sunday was a Tiger-free zone. Sergio led Steve Stricker by three, and among the seven guys tied for third, a whopping six strokes back, just one, Ernie Els, had done a grand-slam jig before. This would be easier than wadding up a little piece of paper and tossing it into that woman's belly button.

His beer commercials may feature plenty of eye candy, but his major losses are getting hard to stomach. Only one player in Sunday's final four pairings, came in higher than Garcia's 73 -- Stricker, who missed three three-footers on the front nine and closed with a 74. "It seems like every time I get into this position, I have no room for error," Sergio moaned. "This is not the first time, unfortunately. I'm playing against a lot of guys out there, more than are in the field."

It was a strange thing to say when you consider that Harrington, the first European to win a major since Paul Lawrie did it at this same venue in '99, fired a 67, or that Sunday surrendered a 64 (Richard Green, who bogyed the last hole to miss the playoff by two) and two 65s (Hunter Mahan and Ben Curtis). Long before Lawrie won a three-man playoff at six over par -- there were eight scores in the 60s the entire week -- Carnoustie had posted its reputation as the hardest of the hard. With the R&A paying much closer attention to the pugilistic tendencies of course superintendent John Philp, who ran amok eight years ago, the silly setup wasn't going to steal the show this time around.

What nobody saw coming, or staying, for that matter, was such a light breeze. A two-club wind was as fierce as it got, and when the field was trimmed to 70, Saturday's scoring average was a Carnouskimpy 71.6. Garcia knew he couldn't shoot 73 in the final round and protect a three-stroke lead with any sense of confidence. If he didn't, he should have. "The guys who played early had a tougher golf course," said Jim Furyk, who went out six groups from the end with Argentine Andres Romero. "We had a chance to score and some guys put up some good numbers."

Few were better than Romero's. A 2005 graduate of the European Challenge Tour who finished 35th on the '06 Order of Merit, the countryman of U.S. Open winner Angel Cabrera was probably the last guy anybody expected to see torching the joint. Romero shot 33 on the front, then birdied the 10th and 11th to grab a share of the lead (seven under) when Garcia's poor chip led to a bogey at the par-3 eighth.

To celebrate his ascension to the top of the leader board, Romero pumped a 4-iron into a gorse bush at the 12th and made a double bogey. He then proceeded to birdie the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th, by which point it became pretty obvious that it didn't matter how long the putts were. Not only was the Argentine leading the British Open by two, he'd become more than a fair bet to eclipse Greg Norman's 64 (1993) as the lowest finish by a champion.

At about the same time the claret jug engraver went into his spell-check mode, Romero pushed his tee shot at the par-4 17th into the right rough. He was left with an approach of 234 yards from wiry grass -- a shot that needed to stay airborne for no more than 80 yards to clear Barry Burn. "I was aware I was leading," he said. "I was doubting between a wood or an iron."

His choice of a 2-iron from such uncut turf was ridiculous, but that doesn't mean Romero deserved what he got. His ball never rose more than a couple of feet off the ground, vanished over the front wall of the burn and caromed off the back steps lining the back end. A few seconds later, Furyk thought he heard something clang off the fence maybe 60 yards to the right -- the one with white stakes planted every 25 feet or so.

"I thought I had a chance to get it on the green," Romero said. "I should have hit the 3-wood, stuck with my initial thought."

A lot happened in the seven or eight minutes it took the kid to reload, knock a hybrid on the green and two-putt from 30 feet for his double-bogey 6. Garcia finally made a birdie putt, his first since the third hole, this one from 10 feet at the 13th to take one of the shortest one-stroke leads in British Open history. Before the Spaniard had even pulled his ball out of the cup, Harrington capitalized on a great bounce at the end of his second shot at the par-5 14th by canning a 15-footer for eagle from the fringe. "When it's your day, you normally chip in or hole a long putt, and none of that was happening," Paddy said. "There was no signal."