Surely the picture of the month was of Chilean miner Mario Sepulveda thumping the air like a two-year-old in jubilation that he was free after 68 days in a dank, dark dungeon almost 700 metres below the Atacama desert.
More than a billion people round the world watched the spellbinding television pictures of the rescue of the 33 miners (and BBC World Television devoted 36 straight hours to the Chilean mine story with not even an intrusion of another world headline); hard-bitten friends admitted to shedding tears of joy as the men were hauled one by one to the surface.
There is something surely miraculous about the return of the miners from being buried alive to blink in the fresh bright air of the desert - which should set us all thinking about the value of human life and death. However, in spite of the repetition of the mystical 33 number - since Jesus Christ supposedly died and rose again from the dead at the age of 33 - and here were 33 miners who reached the surface on 13-10-10 after 33 days of digging the rescue shaft, their rescue was a triumph of human faith, discipline below ground, political determination and engineering grit.
Chile is entitled to celebrate. Engineer Andre Sougarret and his team were the strong silent heroes, who had to drill a hole close enough to discover that there were any miners left alive, widen it to let down supplies of food and drink, organise drilling of rescue shafts through the deep adamantine rock and then haul the men to safety. President Sebastian Pinera and his mining minister Laurence Golborne provided superlative political leadership. The miners themselves never gave up even when they went 17 days without any contact with the outside world.
But there are lessons that should not be forgotten now that the television lights have been turned off, and the miners have returned to their families to face their own private demons.
Pinera promised that Chile itself has changed and will amend safety laws so that the lure of copper export earnings from fast-growing China will not be at the expense of the well-being of workers in what is always a perilous industry. Better laws more strictly enforced might have ensured that Chile did not have to spend almost US$20 million in rescuing the men.
It was an expensive effort to save 33 men under the dramatic glare of global publicity - which contrasts to the darkness of daily indifference in which more than a billion lives of poor people are wasted away every day in hunger, poverty and disease and in which millions die every day without a prayer for their passing.
