I have been used to such things for about 20 years but I haven't entirely got the hang of it. Never take Cork lightly in finals.

Around the time that Cork were breaking Ger Loughnane's heart in the late 1970s the one county which seemed to put it up to them was Galway. The former's three-in-a-row from 197678 was bookended with defeats by Galway in 1975 and '79.

Twice Galway dethroned Cork from their All-Ireland plinth, in 1979 and '85. On neither occasion did the westerners win the All-Ireland but there was a feeling of revolution when it happened. People of roughly my generation were used to treating Cork's championship defeats as a vindication of the common man.

Yet when the stakes were at their highest and everyone assumed that Cork's hand was at its least impressive, it was Galway who folded. This was the case in both 1986 and 1990. The first time around there was some excuse in that Galway were inexperienced and committed tactical errors, but four years later they were seasoned performers with two All-Irelands under their belt.

The tactical error was principally the persistence with a three-man midfield. It had worked swimmingly against Kilkenny in that year's semi-final and sufficiently well to persuade as crafty a practitioner as Cork's manager Johnny Clifford to experiment with the heterodoxy at training sessions.

He quickly concluded that the idea was unworkable and set his players back to hurling in conventional patterns. That was enough for the year in question and Galway were unable to keep pace with Cork in the final. There was a frantic progression from nervous opening to pursuit of the match to resignation but Jimmy Barry-Murphy's last match for the county ended in All-Ireland triumph.

JBM had retired by 1990 which constituted one of the county's more remarkable championship exploits. More than one commentator drew ante-post parallels between what happened in Thurles last Sunday and what happened at the same venue nine years ago when Tipperary were deposed as champions by an unrated Cork team.

But the All-Ireland that September was Cork in essence. In a particular section of the lower deck of the Hogan Stand, an old Galway supporter rose and hobbled out before the end of the match - sorrowfully acknowledging to the surrounding bunch of harooing Corkies: "We'll never beat ye in a final."

It wasn't an unreasonable assertion. After all, if as powerful an ensemble as that year's Galway side with Joe Cooney playing magisterially were still susceptible to a Cork goalrush, what chance would future generations have?

More to the point, in the connoisseur's haunt generally known as the Dergvale Hotel, one member of what was publicly described as "the Blackrock hurling club on tour" reacted to a maudlin recounting of the story of the old man, his private grief and its agonised but selective broadcast: "He's right!" We'll never beat ye in a final.

He's right. That was Cork. The supporters mightn't necessarily feel the team was capable of world domination but they knew that in an average year there would be certain counties they could take - regardless of what evidence the season had presented.

That was nearly a decade ago. It's likely that a new cohort of supporters wasn't quite as sure of itself setting out to Semple Stadium three days ago and Clare supporters were by general account confident enough.

This was a killer for Clare. There was every reason to believe that last Sunday would give the county a full house of Munster final victories against the hurling powers of Munster (Limerick 1995, Tipperary '97, Waterford '98 and Cork '99).

The newspapers (including this one) had been full of the Munster finals of 1977 and '78 and the bitter defeats Cork had inflicted on Clare - commonly viewed as one of the basic driving forces in Ger Loughnane's universe. Every year is different and presents its own urgent challenges but it's probably fair to say that last weekend was one which the Clare manager badly wanted.

Never mind beating Cork in provincial semi-finals - a feat Clare have routinely managed in the last few years - the revolution would be satisfactorily complete once the old oppressor had been shown the door in a final.

Clare's record could survive not completing the full set but to lose this final must have been a bitter vexation to the team and especially the management. There is still every chance to have a crack at the All-Ireland and Sunday's re-activation of history will add to Clare's motivation - as will Cork captain Mark Landers's exuberant but scarcely advisable "three cheers for the former Munster champions Clare".

(Amidst the chuckling at the precociousness of youth, it was hard to avoid reflecting on the stuffy outrage which two years ago had greeted Anthony Daly's far less provocative reference to Clare's no longer being "the whipping boys of Munster" after the defeat of Tipperary in the 1997 provincial final.)

I don't know how Jimmy Barry-Murphy felt about his captain's dig but he acquitted himself with customary class in the Clare dressing-room by saying that he hoped his players would acquit themselves as well as Clare had.

He was re-iterating the words he had spoken to his All-Ireland winning minors of 1995 when as manager he told them at the All-Ireland lunch that if they enjoyed senior success, he hoped that they would carry themselves as well as the then new All-Ireland champions Clare.

In the aftermath of Sunday's final, nearly everyone expressed happiness at Jimmy Barry-Murphy's success. Four years ago, he could have traded gently in the blue-chip world of moving his minor team onto under-21. Instead he decided to take a risk trying to turn around a proud but decrepit old company fallen on bad times.

So bad they nearly killed him in 1996 when he made one of the hardest landings possible in intercounty management. A massive defeat by Limerick was the county's first home defeat since the 1920s. Afterwards in the dressing-room he was courteous but shattered. Enormous amounts of work lay ahead.

It's not all done yet but what has been achieved is one of the more heart-warming tales of recent times. Young talent has been quietly nurtured without grandstanding or subordinating individual dignity to the capricious tyranny of the common good.

Finally, a note about Monday's match report which ambitiously tried to squeeze a lengthy but obscure statistic into the opening paragraph by stating that the record number of years without Cork or Tipperary winning a Munster title still stood at the mark established between 1932-38. This should have been 1932-36 as Tipperary won the 1937 title. The truth of the statistic still stands however: the gap was five years. Had Clare won at the weekend the record would have been broken.

E-mail: smoran@irish-times.ie