Nine minutes left and suddenly the whole summer evaporated. An entire season disappeared into thin air like a magician's rabbit. All the history and all the hype? Gone. All the permutations and possibilities? Puff. Every sub on, every switch made. Endgame.

Nine minutes left and Tipperary had just scored a goal and suddenly it was just Clare and Tipperary on a hurling field and the whole world to play for. The voltage ran from the field through the crowd of 65,575 and made heat out of the air.

There is no heat like it. All-Ireland final day with minutes left and nowhere to hide. Some reputations died, scorched and shrunk. More of them Tipperary reputations than Clare reputations. When the light was blinding and the heat was white, Clare stood there and hurled themselves to a better place.

Extraordinary scenes as the minutes dwindled.

Liam Cahill's goal left Tipperary a point adrift. Three minutes passed and much nervous foostering ensued before the next score came. The next score was always going to be crucial. Whoever scored it would own the game's momentum. Only brave men would risk the ignominy that would come with being prodigal just then.

Jamesie O'Connor got it. When he goes scooting away low like that, sensible people would bet their houses on Jamesie scoring, no matter what the circumstance. Two points clear, six minutes left.

One hundred and twenty seconds later Tomas Dunne dropped a 65 out of the sky and on to the Clare crossbar.

On great days, strange things happen. "Those things usually bounce downwards" said Liam Doyle afterwards. But this one bounced back up at an odd trajectory, over a few gape-mouthed Clare heads and on to the meaty part of Eugene O'Neill's hurley. Goal. Tipp one point clear, four minutes left.

On great days strange things happen. There are limits though. Berlin Walls crumble and pictures come from Mars and Dana runs for president but Brian Lohan's man doesn't score the winning goal in the All-Ireland hurling final. Does not happen. Not while will counts for something.

Davey Fitzgerald launches the puck-out with the wounded venom of a man who feels hard done by. As Ollie Baker remembers it, "the ball broke from the half back line and it bounced in front of me and I was able to run on to it and I tapped it over the bar."

Could it have been any less complicated? Yes.

Three and a half minutes left. Nothing between Tipp and Clare. Faint hearts leave the field now please, calling all faint hearts.

Late in the 69th minute, the hand just about to roll over into the 70th and final minute. The hurling is furious and fragmented. The audience is voluble and demented. Colin Lynch has the ball. He squeezes it at the second attempt out to Jamesie O'Connor. Suddenly a moment of calm. The inevitability of it stills us all and we reach for the biros to mark the score after his name even before he steadies himself.

Jamesie takes it on his good side. You know the story by now.

Clare are a point ahead and from the old stand a shrill of whistles comes. Blow it up ya hoor. The whistles give sway to one of those rumbles of pure inarticulateable excitement. Johnny Leahy is away. Johnny Leahy. Just needs to take his point to give us all another day out.

But Johnny is no grey accountant, not a man for the ledgers and the digits and the decimals. Never plays the percentages. He has more epic qualities than that. Today the very thing which makes him great makes him poor. Johnny shoots for the moon, goes for the whole pot. And Davey Fitz, small and sensible and the inverse of Johnny Leahy in every way, scoops the ball fastidiously away from his right side as if Johnny's impudence were an insult to his housekeeping.

Seconds later Dickie Murphy blows the whistle and waves his arms like a conductor whose orchestra has arrived at the end of a stirring symphony.

"One of the greatest All-Irelands that was ever played," said Ger Loughnane outside the door of the winners' dressing room. "It ended in an epic way. It ended in a fitting way too, with Jamesie O' Connor putting the ball over the bar."

There was a final twist in this tale of the unexpected.

Johnny Leahy's commendable sense of the heroic fitted the soul of the game. It was a time for big men and honest men. Leahy fitted the bill but at the second time of asking Tipp were close. But no cigar.

No shame either. Clare, heroically calm and profoundly self-onfident, took it all in their stride. The best hurling team in the country. And best by more than a point's worth if the conjuror pulls recent history out of the hat again and places three seasons into context.