THE boisterous mob in a packed Hill 16 were incensed by an element in the new Cusack Stand - they would not loin in the Mexican Wave.
The home of Gaelic games was overrun by a foreign horde on Saturday as Notre Dame and the US Naval Academy brought American football to Croke Park for the Shamrock Classic. For the record, Notre Dame's Fighting Irish torpedoed the Midshipmen 54-27.
Against all the predictions - aside from those of the promoters - nearly 40,000 people turned up on an overcast but warm afternoon for what turned into a genuinely festive occasion.
The marching bands marched, the cheerleaders cheered and the leprechaun lepped about the place with a big yellow card that read NOISE. Whenever he waved it, he got it
Mike Wadsworth, the athletic director of Notre Dame and former Canadian ambassador to Ireland, put the visit of the Irish into a more general perspective. "The impact for Ireland is fantastic. Not only in terms of tourism, but in terms of the number of people here for the first time experiencing and learning about what modern day Ireland is all about, which most of us back in North America don't really appreciate. So I think for Ireland it's been a great thing."
The whole trip was everything the Notre Dame party had hoped for, Wadsworth said. "This whole week has gone, in terms of the academic conference and the evening for John Hume, all of these things in terms of Notre Dame wanting to launch itself in Ireland has just been outstanding. We couldn't have hoped that it would go better than it has.
"We have future plans for establishing a campus in Dublin and had an academic conference that drew people from throughout the British Isles and Ireland. It was really a first class event, with some tremendous exchange of ideas along the lines of pathways to peace, trying to talk about what the future for peace is in this island.
"The evening we had honouring John Hume for his great humanitarian work in Northern Ireland equally was a wonderful evening. John Hume was at his best and that is saying an awful lot.
"To be able to complete this afternoon with a great performance from the football team puts the icing on the cake and I think we are all going to be going home to South Bend very happy".