McVoy claimed that it would take someone roughly 5 years to solve the problems that bitkeeper solved. Torvalds took a few weeks of break and did it. Granted git at that time was far removed from the feature set and polish it had after a few years.

But considering how many times we have heard the "I can build this in a weekend of coding" trope, git is truly an exception weekend-project (+) that actually delivered on the promise.

(+) - Taking vast liberties by stretching the weekend