O’Driscoll putting the finishing touches on his Irish legend

The other day in a nice sitdown piece for RTÉ, Shane Horgan brought Brian O’Driscoll back to where it kind of all began for him: St Patrick’s weekend, 2000, Paris.

“There was a public you after that,” Horgan would put it to his old teammate. “You had a different interaction with supporters than anyone else who played for Ireland. Did you have to change your life much?”

O’Driscoll would later accept Horgan’s assertion had some validity — “I had to grow up quickly as a 21-year-old” — but initially, he laughed it off.