CHAPEL HILL, NC (MarketWatch) — Remember Greece?

Wasn’t that the country whose sovereign-debt crisis broke onto the world financial scene last December, precipitating similar crises at several other countries in the euro-zone and almost bringing down the entire European Monetary Union?

Yeah — that Greece.

Isn’t it amazing how quickly we forget?

It was only a few short months ago when panicky investors considered the Greek debt crisis to spell the end of not only the bull market on Wall Street but also of the fledging economic recovery.

Today, in contrast, investors have all but forgotten about that crisis. Earlier this week, in fact, not only Greece but also Ireland and Spain, two of the other countries that were also written off earlier this year as all but bankrupt, were successfully able to sell a significant amount of government debt.

The particular statistic that I found most revealing in this regard: When trying recently to sell 400 million Eurodollars’ worth of Treasury bills, Greece found that demand exceeded supply by a ratio of 6.25-to-1! Read full story on Greek debt auction.

No wonder they kid each other on Wall Street that the long term lasts only from lunch to dinner.

Consider a chart I first produced in late February, which was based on how the stock market had on average reacted to four prior sovereign-debt crises. It was in late January and early February, of course, that the stock market underwent its first serious correction because of the Greek crisis. (Read my Mar. 1 column.)

I reported then that the stock market had largely shrugged off prior sovereign-debt crises and, after some initial volatility, had on average been 17% higher in one year’s time.

For this column I updated the chart with seven more months’ of data. Though the stock market is not doing as well as the average of the previous four, notice that it isn’t that far behind either — and markedly better than what the skeptics were predicting at the time. (If you don’t believe me, just read some of the comments that readers posted in reaction to my Mar. 1 column.)

This walk down memory lane might suggest that investors are now at the opposite end of the sentiment spectrum from where they stood earlier this year, when they were gripped by panic. But that would not be accurate.

It is true that the short-term market timers tracked by the Hulbert Financial Digest are somewhat more optimistic now than they were at the depths of the crisis. But they are not excessively bullish, either.

Consider these timers’ average recommended equity exposure, as measured by the Hulbert Stock Newsletter Sentiment Index (or HSNSI). It currently stands at 21.4%, which means that these timers on average are still allocated some 79% of their equity portfolios to cash.

It is interesting to note that the HSNSI’s current level is quite close to where it stood on May 7, the day after the famous “Flash Crash.” The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +1.19% on that day stood at 10,380, or about 350 points below where it stands today.

So even though the stock market is higher now than then, the average market timer is just as pessimistic today as he was the day after the markets apparently had become completely unraveled.

In other words, there doesn’t today appear to be excessive optimism.

Contrarian analysis therefore concludes that the market’s recent rally still has room to run.