I was there... and it was that good

AS a sporting highlight, the few minutes before a game might sound an odd choice. You’ll understand if you were lucky enough to be in Semple Stadium just after 3 o’clock on June 27.

The minor cup had been presented, the latecomers were being accommodated, and the sun had come out.

Then you realised something at about the same time as everyone else in the stadium. This is it: the Munster hurling final. Beforehand there's the usual talk about legendary players and epic contests, but in the few minutes before the Munster final it hits you that the ticket you fought so hard to get may be your visa to witness immortality. Before the ball is thrown in, anything is possible. This game could be as good as '02, '95, '84, '78 or further back: the shuddering clashes of the '60s, the magnificent seven from '49 to '54, the epics of the '30s.

Then the weight of the event comes to bear, and you realise the vague suffocating sensation is pure tension, anxiety in its uncut form. When it's just about too much, when you're rolling your eyes at the preliminaries, the Sean Treacy Pipe Band and the cidery breath of the guy beside you, the tannoy squawks and the kingfisher-glimpses of white and red streak out across the green and into a wall of sound Phil Spector never dreamed of.

The poet Bernard Spencer once wrote that it was a lot to say of an occasion that nothing was lacking. He would have found a lot of agreement on that observation six months ago in Thurles, but incredibly, the game itself lived up to the highest expectations.

For those who indict the Munster hurling final as over-romanticised, the 2004 model will be forever called forward as the prime witness for the defence. Other sports have their advocates, and we acknowledge them as honest according to their lights, but if an occasion and contest in the last 12 months was the equal of Cork-Waterford this summer, then frankly it must have taken place on Pluto.

This was a game so good it aspired to the status of music. The sound and fury of the opening half, the operatic swings and setbacks, gave way to a free-form second half; with John Mullane gone, Waterford were forced to improvise and riff on possession like jazzmen looking for a way into a virtuoso's solo, and eventually they succeeded.

Incident and riposte were everywhere. Dan Shanahan continued his summer spree until Sean Óg Ó hAilpín introduced himself. Brian Corcoran resumed a casual eminence until the supply lines were disrupted. Paul Flynn loosened his wrists; Ben O'Connor made his marker's hamstrings creak.

You probably remember the closing stages most vividly, however. Time was almost up when Seamus Prendergast landed a huge point for Waterford, but Tom Kenny retorted from distance to leave a point between the sides. Waterford were looking a little drained, as you'd expect from 14 men, and Cork's extra man at the back was beginning to tell. The last surge upfield was set up by a long Ronan Curran delivery which dropped in the Waterford half.

The patch of real estate on which it dropped is halfway between the 65 and 45-metre lines at the town end of Semple Stadium, to the 'keeper's left as he looks upfield. It's barely two square metres in area, but it hosted the resolution of the game. The Munster title was a live issue when play moved there but it ended as a contest when the ball was won. That said, it wouldn't be quite true to say the entire game came down to the clash. In a one-point game after 41 scores, the pitch and yaw of supremacy can't be reduced to a single joust for possession miles from the goal, but this still distilled the essence of the contest.

Underneath the dropping ball were Diarmuid O'Sullivan and Ken McGrath. O'Sullivan had seemed unhappy for most of the second half; left drifting in the free role, he hadn't had opportunities for hand-to-hand and looked bereft. McGrath had howitzered over a point from his own half before the break but didn't come into the game until Niall McCarthy was called ashore in the last quarter. It was left to them to contest the final encounter.

There isn't much suspense to be wrung out of it, mind. McGrath won a terrific ball over his opponent's head, was fouled coming out, and that was that. A purist might suggest a ball so long in the air and coming down so steeply should have been batted out; that might have been the percentage move but McGrath backed himself and his handling, and in doing so he gave the final the signature of a classic. The game didn't need it as an illustrative flourish, but it was in keeping with the character of the previous 70-odd minutes that an outrageous flash of hurling theatre decided the final tussle.

The match ended officially seconds later, when Paul Flynn drove the resultant free down into the Cork goalmouth, but that was the doctors calling a time of death; the competition had ended in McGrath's left hand.

They say hurling is in crisis but then it always is; that an All-Ireland contested by a handful of counties is hardly worthy of the name as if every football county could win the Sam Maguire; that after the flickering of Clare and Wexford the resurgence of the old firm spells bad news as if all those other counties couldn't duplicate application and spirit; and that the impending clashes of player power and image rights and broadcasting agreements mean the end of civilisation as we know it.

Maybe so. Maybe the time will come when 2004 is seen as the last light before apocalypse. But what a shaft of light; if you made that journey last June you saw myth in action. Bear in mind that in 10, 20, 40 years, you'll be quietening the conversations of the young and innocent by saying simply: "2004? I was there. And it's true what they say. It was that good."

Whatever else happens, we'll always have Thurles.