In an interview on local radio the morning after Northern Ireland qualified for Euro 2016, Carl Frampton declared the feats of the night before the country’s greatest sporting achievement for a generation. That might sound excessively humble coming from a world champion – and it might not have pleased the man sitting beside Frampton at Windsor Park, the four-times major winner, Rory McIlroy – but the boxer was not far wrong.

Michael O’Neill’s team came from nowhere to qualify for the European Championship. And, having been lumped among the fifth-tier seeds – alongside those other titans of world football, Cyprus, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Macedonia, Moldova, Lithuania, Albania and Iceland (who beat Northern Ireland home and away in the Euro 2008 qualifiers) – they have become the first pot-five team to win a qualifying group. For a country with a population five times smaller than London, these are crazy days. “I may never top this,” said O’Neill. “How I am feeling, the bond I have with the players, how the country and supporters feel, we just want to keep building on that.”

Beating Greece at home might not sound that impressive, but the significance of Thursday night’s crucial result will not have been lost on any of the fans who travelled to Athens for Northern Ireland’s final qualifier of the Euro 2004 campaign 11 years ago. After a string of seven matches without scoring a single goal, they went to Greece with one simple objective: to put the ball in the net and end the campaign with a modicum of self-respect. They lost 1-0, finishing the group with a record of eight games played, eight goals conceded, no goals scored and three points to show for their efforts. Things could only get better.

Greece went on to win Euro 2004 and Northern Ireland were left to reflect on two unwanted statistics: 16 matches without a win and 10 matches without a goal. These were the days when a miscued shot into the side-netting would result in the chant: “A goal, we nearly scored a goal, we nearly scored a goal.” When David Healy headed in a consolation in a 4-1 friendly defeat to Norway in early 2004, it was seen as a step in the right direction. After 1,298 minutes without a goal, progress becomes a relative term.

In the years since the total abyss of the Euro 2004 campaign, things have picked up. First there was the famous victory over England in 2005, then the sense-defying 3-2 win over Spain in 2006 and then the impressive 2-1 defeat of Sweden in 2007, but these results were always at home and were often sandwiched between disappointing performances against mediocre teams.

In truth, that inconsistency has never truly disappeared and probably never will. Most of the players in the current set-up suffered the humiliation of losing to Luxembourg in the last set of qualifiers. And they haven’t managed to win a friendly since March 2008, near the start of Nigel Worthington’s time in charge. O’Neill has carried on that dire sequence of results, with the record now at 20 friendlies without a win – a stretch that includes defeats to Scotland, Chile (twice), Uruguay, Turkey (twice), Holland, Norway, Montenegro, Albania, Serbia, Italy and Hungary. Most fans thought the run would end when they travelled to Crewe for a bizarre match against Qatar earlier this year, but our future World Cup hosts, the 92nd best team on the planet, managed to secure a 1-1 draw.

There’s no point in denying the obvious. This remains a limited group of players who will go to the finals with little experience at this level. O’Neill has already said he will ask Roy Hodgson for advice on how to organise the trip and the fans are equally green about travelling to a major championship. A fair portion of supporters have no memory of the World Cups of 1986 and 1982, never mind 1958. McIlroy was born in 1989, with Frampton and the team’s leading goalscorer Kyle Lafferty both born in 1987.

Lafferty’s unlikely rise to the occasion has been emblematic of the team’s ascent. When the qualifiers began he was best known for an embarrassing dive in Scotland and for being called an “unmanageable womaniser” by Palermo president Maurizio Zamparini. Now he is alongside Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Wayne Rooney and Edin Dzeko in the top scorer table for the qualifiers. Lafferty says he has grown up since returning from Italy but, even when calling him an “Irishman without rules”, Zamparini had to admit his affection for the striker, saying: “On the field, he’s a great player because he’s given us everything he had and more.”

Lafferty has brought that determination, and more, to the campaign, but it was fitting to see him step aside on Thursday night to create some space for the team’s captain and true talisman, Steve Davis. The Southampton midfielder is the axis on which this team spins, the only player with the ability and bravery to pluck the ball from the air, pick up his head and orchestrate a game of possession football. Davis was first given the armband as a 21-year-old and is, in reality, the only top class player in the country. He gives their helter-skelter style some sense of order and calm.

The fans are not blessed with many natural heroes but, like the team, they make the most of what they are given. They still sing Away in a Manger for David Healy at every match and they still chant the name of Jimmy Quinn, a striker who retired two decades ago having scored 12 goals in as many years for Northern Ireland. Even the song – “He’s tall, he’s thin, he looks like Jimmy Quinn… Jimmy Quinn, Jimmy Quinn” – shows the lack of options on offer.

Therein lies the joy of their achievement. No one really dared to dream that they would do it, not even the manager. When the draw was made, O’Neill said he was aiming for a place in the play-offs: “You could possibly get third place with 14 points, which I think is achievable.” That target was reached a while ago and it has been obliterated since. No one even considered winning the group.

The squad is not full of household names, à la England, or composed from a golden generation, like Wales. These guys seem to have more in common with their fans than other teams at this level. Josh Magennis, who scored his first international goal on Thursday, does not turn out for one of Europe’s premier clubs. He plays for Kilmarnock and began his international career as a goalkeeper. Lafferty, the man he replaced in the team, has only played 13 minutes of club football this season. Craig Cathcart, Oliver Norwood, Niall McGinn and Stuart Dallas could walk into bars across the country without being recognised. And even football journalists have struggled to work out that Michael O’Neill is not the same person as Martin O’Neill.

There is something wonderfully old-school about this Northern Ireland team. The country has produced maverick sporting geniuses before, but there are no stars in this squad. They are largely ignored by the media and, because the fans expect so little, any success is a bonus. Supporters do not groan about misplaced passes or boo their own players. It was somehow appropriate that their qualification on Thursday was overshadowed by the Republic of Ireland beating Germany and that they won the group on Sunday while most of the country was watching the Irish rugby team play France at the World Cup.

But anyone who did watch those matches spent their time well. In an era when every football story seems connected to money – whether it be transfer funds, extortionate wages, leveraged takeovers, million-pound payoffs or parachute payments – it is refreshing to watch a team play with no mention of earnings, contracts, resale value or image rights. Every decision in club football seems to be led by financial concerns these days – the bigger clubs work out whether to prioritise playing in Europe or qualifying for Europe and the smaller sides have to weigh up costs of committing to a cup run – but Northern Ireland, Wales, Albania and Iceland have served up some Roy of the Rovers stuff over the last few days. It doesn’t say much for the state of club football when countries with tiny populations are more likely to cause upsets than clubs with vast wealth, but that’s a story for another day.

It was fitting that Northern Ireland secured their place at the Euros on Thursday evening a few hours after news broke about Sepp Blatter’s ban for his “disloyal payment” to Michel Platini – another tarnished figure, who was the top scorer at Euro 1984 in a previous lifetime. All the stories about Fifa, corruption, net spend, the sack race, managerial mind games and all those things that seem so important but largely serve to alienate you from the sport you fell in love with as a kid melted away over the weekend as a group of guys went out and achieved something extraordinary. There is still some glory in the game after all.