We have been down this road before, however the painful lessons of the very recent past haven't hit the back of the net as often as opposing strikers.
Once again the headlines are screaming of the urgency of yet another World Cup qualifying campaign that has veered off course. Do or die! Now or never!
The air is thick with panic and desperation, so the godfather of local football determines that now is the time for the Little Magician!
Our superhero, having spurned an earlier overture, accepts the late call to duty. He arrives in a blaze of publicity. Almost instantly, hope springs eternal. In this Independence season, patriotic fervour is revived and the nation is buffeted by the winds of hope. The wave of optimism is building to a grand crescendo and the poor little fellas from Guatemala will surely be washed away in a sea of red at the Hasely Crawford Stadium.
Then that irritating buzzer on the alarm clock goes off. This time, there is no snooze button to offer a brief respite from the blinding rays of reality.
To his great credit, Russell Latapy has warned against delusions of grandeur, reminding everyone that it is still a team game and everyone will have to contribute against the Guatemalans tomorrow and away to the Costa Ricans in San Jose on Wednesday if this latest effort is not to go the way of all previous attempts to get into the Big Yard of the beautiful game.
But did anyone really listen to him?
Everything now is Latapy this, Latapy that, Latapy the other. How brilliant he has been at training so far. How the other players are almost falling over themselves in rushing to the nearest microphone to marvel at the vision and passing skills of the dreadlocked midfielder. You half expect that within the opening minutes tomorrow afternoon, Kelvin Jack will roll the ball out to our superhero on the edge of the penalty area, who then shakes and sidesteps at least five bemused Guatemalans before threading the perfectly weighted pass that allows Dwight Yorke to put Trinidad and Tobago 1-0 up with a neat sidefooter.
With this, and other moments of glory bound to unfold, what is Leo Beenhakker going on about in saying that Latapy will have to prove himself first before being selected in the starting eleven? I'm sure the phlegmatic Dutchman himself doesn't believe that, except that he has to keep up appearances as exercising a measure of control as team coach.
Even if he is blindfolded and on crutches, the former national captain cannot do any worse than what masqueraded as a midfield against the Americans in East Hartford more than two weeks ago.
More importantly, and old Leo will obviously know this already, whatever Jack wants, Jack gets.
No one can ever accuse Mr Warner of not wanting the very best for football in this country. He may enrage other CONCACAF (I thought the name was changed to the Football Confederation a couple years ago?) members by using his good offices as regional boss and FIFA vice-president to aid his homeland, but partisan politics notwithstanding, he remains Mr Football in these parts.
Yet often that passion for the red, white and black gets in the way of proper judgement and occasionally results in him overstepping the bounds of an administrator.
Remember the 1998 campaign, when there was great fanfare at the arrival of all the foreign-based pros for the opening game of the semi-final qualifying round against Costa Rica at the Queen's Park Oval? Despite the galaxy of stars, the only goal of the game was scored by the visitors through Ronald Gomez.
In the immediate aftermath, Warner proposed a complete revamping of tactics which were leaked to the media as an elaborate series of arrows, x's and o's by the well-meaning patriot. Not surprisingly, things got worse.
Zoran Vranes, the man from Montenegro, was fired and replaced by Sebastiao Perreira de Araujo, a Brazilian with a curriculum vitae as long as a football pitch, although it could make no difference and our heroes couldn't even make it to the final round of qualifying, where Jamaica made history in getting to France '98.
Fast-forward to the era of another Brazilian, Rene Simoes, the man who got the Jamaicans to the World Cup finals and was expected to do the same for a flagging T&T in 2002 after things started to go wrong for the incumbent coach, Scotsman Ian Porterfield. A stickler for discipline, Simoes was forced to back down from his own position of ruling Latapy and Yorke out of a game against El Salvador for disciplinary reasons.
His authority gone and team-spirit in the La Basse, defeat followed defeat and the two golden boys proclaimed that they were done with representing their country.
So here we are at the crossroads again, placing great store behind another foreign saviour, a returning hero and the continued tactics of vaille-qui-vaille, driven by the belief that a nation so supremely talented cannot be denied its date with destiny forever.
Latapy will make a difference, there is no doubt. Whether it will be enough of a difference to compensate for so many shortcomings is another matter.
Unless he can, like Mandrake, gesture hypnotically, this magician from Laventille cannot do it alone against a Guatemalan team undaunted by the potential and reputations in a team they put five goals past five months ago.