An elated Colin Montgomerie starts the celebration after sinking the clinching putt. AP

This was Colin Montgomerie's finest moment. As his par putt rolled in on the 18th green at Oakland Hills, he dropped his putter, raised his arms, basked in the bright September sunlight and the even brighter admiration of his teammates. He had just clinched the Ryder Cup for Europe and although it was little more than a formality, it was no less important. And for Monty, whose game, ego and marriage all crumbled in the past year to the point where readers were starting to wonder if his first name was really "beleaguered," it was no less sweet.

Monty wanted to win the Ryder Cup. Even more, he needed to win the Ryder Cup. While Sergio Garcia and Lee Westwood had better match records this week at 4-0-1, Monty (who went 3-1) was the focal point of this team and its most valuable player.

You saw it when he birdied the first hole of the first match on the first day. It felt like a body blow against the entire American team, which must have collectively coughed and thought, "Uh-oh."

You saw it when Monty birdied the first hole again in Sunday's singles matches. As Monty launched his drive off the first tee, NBC commentator Johnny Miller predicted, "Monty's going to lose this match, I just feel it." Miller isn't wrong often, but this time he was.

You saw it when Monty finished it off at the 18th hole. David Toms played a gutsy round despite performing at less than his best, yet somehow drained a clutch par putt at the 18th to give himself a chance to earn a halve.

You saw it again when Monty, who's never lost in Ryder Cup singles play, holed his par putt to win the match. And since Westwood had holed a huge putt on the same green a few minutes earlier to get Europe's team total to 13 1/2 points, Monty's putt got the team to 14.5, enough to claim outright victory and not only vindicate captain Bernhard Langer's decision to make the 41-year-old warhorse a wild-card addition to the team but also reinforce Montgomerie's position as the European team's true leader. Monty drove in the winning run, in effect, in an 18 1/2 to 9 1/2 rout. It didn't matter in the grand scheme of things but it's one more brick in his remarkable Ryder Cup career. He has a 19-8-5 record in the Matches, has played on four winning teams in seven appearances and helped the Euros win four of the last five Cups.

"You can't put into words what it's like," Monty said as he joined a wild champagne-spraying celebration behind the 18th green. "None of us will be in our beds tonight. We played for each other. Huge, huge."

It may be good news for the Americans that Monty's Ryder Cup career is winding down -- although there's certain to be at least one captaincy in his future, it's probably at least four years off -- but there is bad news aplenty.

The margin of victory was embarrassing. The Americans were outplayed in every facet of the game. The Europeans hit more fairways, hit more greens, made more putts and played better. How bad was it? The Americans had their backs to the wall and needed to win nine of 12 singles matches to salvage a tie. Filled with determination, they went out and won, uh, four. Yeah, just missed.

The worse news is, American fans had better get used to it. While the Americans fielded an aging team that featured two players who'll likely be busy on the senior tour in two years (Jay Haas and Fred Funk) and five Ryder Cup rookies, at least three of whom probably won't make another team, the European team is young and only going to get better. I like their chances of winning the next four or five Ryder Cups. While thirtysomethings Westwood, Darren Clarke and Padraig Harrington age gracefully and provide solid play and experience, Europe seems loaded with young talent. Paul Casey and Luke Donald are potential superstars. Ian Poulter is also going to be a star. So are two players who couldn't even make this team, Justin Rose and Fredrik Jacobson. And there's the bane of U.S. teams for Ryder Cups to come, Garcia, who combines fiery emotion with the kind of clutch shotmaking that Tiger Woods used to pull off.

That's one hell of a nucleus of eight guys. and certainly stronger than anything the U.S. can put together. Assuming Woods and Phil Mickelson remain among the top players in the world for a few years, who else can the U.S. count on? Davis Love III has hit his 40s and has what, maybe one or two more Ryder Cups in him? And it's not like he's been a dominant Ryder Cup player, anyway.

Chris DiMarco has the fire and was the team's leading point-getter (2 1/2 points) but he's 36 and getting by on guts, not technique. Jim Furyk and Toms, fresh off wrist surgeries this year, are solid players but they certainly weren't their old selves at Oakland Hills. Will they bounce back?

Who's going to step up and help the Americans turn this Ryder Cup slump around? Chad Campbell got his feet wet this time and won a singles match but couldn't win a point despite pairing once each with Love and Furyk.

Stewart Cink proved his worth as a captain's pick, playing reasonably well and earning a win and a halve in four matches. Chris Riley is only 30 but his ballstriking remains a little suspect and when he benched himself for Saturday afternoon's foursomes play after finally sparking Woods to a bestball win, he left himself open for criticism and let down a lot of people, including his captain and, most of all, Woods.

Think about who else is out there for the U.S., and it's mostly potential that hasn't been realized. Where are the young guns? Charles Howell didn't even threaten to make this team. The Americans badly need him to elevate his game.

To hope for David Duval to become a top-10 player in the world again is asking for an awful lot. John Daly? Probably not. Todd Hamilton, your British Open champ, will be within range of 40 by the next Ryder Cup. Among the young players, they're unproven, and that includes Zach Johnson, Jonathan Kaye, John Rollins and Ben Curtis. The next generation of players, such as Hunter Mahan, Casey Wittenberg and BIll Haas, haven't even established themselves yet as tour players, much less Ryder Cuppers. That's going to leave the door open for guys in their late 30s, whether it's Jerry Kelly or Scott Verplank and Justin Leonard to reassert themselves. Whoever makes this next U.S. team ,however, is going to run into a European Ryder Cup buzzsaw and a loud, loud, loud Irish crowd in two years at the K Club in Ireland. You can pretty much mark down Europe right now as the winner in 2006.

Don't blame captain Hal Sutton for this loss. The Woods-Mickelson pairing wasn't quite the failure it was made out to be. They actually played well in bestball but ran into a buzzsaw when Clarke and Monty -- there he is again -- put up eight birdies, an unbelievable round given the windy conditions and the pin locations. Sutton's players simply did a poor job of playing. That was the worst golf Americans have put on display in these Matches since any of us started paying attention to this event in the mid 1980s

"I thought our team chemistry was really good," said Jay Haas, "they just outplayed us."

Said Toms, "We've been on the wrong end of the celebration the last few times, we've got a lot of work to do."

Sutton solved the chemistry problem. He couldn't solve the sudden and perplexing problem of bad golf. "Hal did a great job, we just didn't play for him,"  Love said. "It's going to be a long two years."

You'd better hope Love is right because actually, it could be a very long next decade. Europe's reign has only just begun.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Gary Van Sickle writes for the magazine's Golf Plus section and is a regular contributor to SI.com.