There are moments here - like the first all-Northern all-Ireland final - when the gap of understanding between Catholics and Protestants as communities yawns wide, writes Fionnuala O Connor
When it comes to the pull of the GAA, one lot genuinely does not know what makes the other tick. In the lead-up to last Sunday, near-perfect unknowing gave off steam as well as bafflement of a less heated kind. Few GAA fans had energy left to care.
Last Friday morning the BBC's phone-in radio programme Talkback gave about a third of its running time to anticipation of the final. Resentment burned up the phones; between the lines the conviction that the GAA is the IRA at play. Several unionist politicians came on to complain at the level of coverage. The widespread display of Armagh and Tyrone county colours smacked, they said, of political triumphalism. Another example of nationalists trampling on unionists, said the DUP's Maurice Morrow.
Talkback's anchor man David Dunseith teasingly suggested that such complaints came oddly from people themselves devoted to marches and flags. Ulster Unionist Derek Hussey, who leads a band in the small Tyrone town of Castlederg, wouldn't have it. Orangeism, he said, unlike the GAA, was a purely cultural and religious organisation.
Clearly much offence lay in the visibility of fervour: clumps of orange throughout Armagh that had nothing to do with the Orange Order, thickets of red and white bunting in the lovely Glenelly valley, the shrine in a demure street off the Stranmillis road in Belfast's university land, a student house bedecked with Tyrone colours, centrepiece in a downstairs window the red hand helpfully labelled Tír Eoghain.
Only a few years ago, outside Catholic Belfast no phrase in Irish would have appeared in a downstairs window. But triumphalism is the wrong word: confidence comes closer.
The surge of Northern GAA interest in the past decade is entwined with new assurance about political prospects and renewed interest in the Irish language, but also reflects GAA popularity in the rest of Ireland. A former player thought the very public expression of support was new, and meant confidence. "GAA was always the most powerful demonstration of a 32 county-ism, teams from Clare and Kilkenny heading for Crossmaglen and Armoy. It's just as important that the GAA's built round the parish, particularly in the country. The club's the centre of social life, where wedding receptions are held and where you go after funerals. There's summer schemes for kids, evening classes in dancing, the language."
This man supposed Protestants might have shivered when Tyrone captain Peter Canavan praised the team's adviser, "Father Gerard" in his victory speech. "They'd be wrong. You don't even have to go to Mass anymore to play Gaelic."
A sport that crosses all classes, drawn on local talent with the strongest local support, is enviable in Protestant eyes. Their's is a thinner sense of community, the Orange hall a local hub for only one section. Gaelic games' popularity leaves many in the other community open-mouthed, particularly sports fans. That 80,000 throng in Croke Park, half of them from Tyrone; 20,000 in Belfast's Casement Park to see Down versus Monaghan - gates that Northern Ireland playing in Windsor Park never sees.
The fierce allegiance of GAA fans to townland, parish and county is a major mystification to Protestant onlookers, though few in the city are aware of the animosity between teams based only miles apart. A Belfast man with in-laws in "the country" describes how his wife once brought her mother to the club in the nearest town to see him, after he gave a talk at a function there. She lived four miles away and supported the local club, sworn enemies of the club he was in. She wouldn't come in, "in case anyone would say imagine you in here".
The same man recalled the perfect exposure of mutual misunderstanding during a discussion last year, in a Gaelic club in what once was the "Murder Triangle" of Armagh and Tyrone. "They asked a loyalist woman to come. First she was stunned at the £1 million clubhouse. She thought Armagh were triumphalist when they won the final but she coaxed young fellas not to stone their buses.
"There was this gruff Tyrone shout from the back: 'Their effing buses wouldn't get through our place without being stoned.' The poor woman was bewildered: weren't they all nationalists? The Sinn Féiner in the chair tried to explain to her that this was a historic inter-county rivalry. Your man at the back shouts, 'Francie, just leave it.'"
So, too simple to say political triumphalism. But what did the 26 Counties make of that moment at the end of Sunday's game, when the Tyrone team went into their dressing-room, put their arms round each other and sang the Soldier's Song?