Locker Room:Some Sundays the pilot light refuses to come on. Despite the impression of Meath having what American electoral pollsters might call Big Mo and Cork having, well, Big Cussen, yesterday's All-Ireland semi-final was one of those events which refused to happen.
And for Meath the season stubbornly refused to unfold a final chapter they had already written in their heads. It showed us the treacherous danger of easy perceptions.
In the end it was a game about two men and not much else. Colm Coyle and Billy Morgan are at different ends of their management careers yet both have that incredibly strong identification with their own county that their personality traits seem replicated in the county team.
When it was all over yesterday, which was well before the final whistle, Billy and Colm were the best part of the story. Billy's epic love affair with Cork football seemed to be about to peter out in a series of unsuccessful semi-final appearances. Colm was making Meath in the precise image in which Meath had made him.
Easy, neat and pat. Shows how much we know.
There was only one thing we were right about. It was dull. The game was anticipated with about the same amount of feverish anticipation as might attend the opening of a utilities bill. Fewer than 40,000 huddled in the big house and those that were there created an atmosphere of surprising solemnity the game refused to interfere with. It was a dull game, one of those semi-finals to be immediately deleted from the memory bank.
Strange and confounding afternoon. It should have rained but it didn't. It was one of those dour games which deserved tupperware skies and relentless drizzle. It should have degenerated into a dogfight but it petered out into nothingness. As often happens with semi-finals, the two sides arrived here with vastly differing emotions and feelings about themselves. That was what determined the outcome.
Walking down Jones's Road to Croke Park about an hour before throw-in we were met by a small group of Meath supporters singing a familiar air about how they were Walking In A Gerro Wonderland.
Whatever the Gerro Wonderland may look like it is not a place in which the residents feel grateful enough to reward the Wonderland's guiding influence with first-preference votes. Yet the paean to Graham Geraghty seemed to indicate something a little odd and unfamiliar lodged in the Meath psyche. Meath seemed fatally cocky about yesterday's business.
Hard to blame them. Having troubled Dublin, Meath overcome an aversion to qualifier football and seemed to be putting together the sort of game-on-game improvements which might see them peaking in September and writing a new primer for timed runs toward glory.
They had assembled, or so it seemed, a gunslinging posse of young forwards who would strike fear into the blood of any defender. Stephen Bray was a shoo-in All Star, Shane O'Rourke a fine reminder of Meath's old, solid virtues, There was Brian Farrell and of course Gerro of Wonderland. On the bench was Cian Ward, whom we had designated earlier in the year as le supersub de notre temps.
And we assumed also that this Meath had that genetic quirk which mutates the DNA of all Meath teams, that they wouldn't know when they were beaten, that they would feed off the harrooing from the Hogan. And they had a first-year manager: a bright and revered man who had brought new ideas and an old template. A manager's first year is always the time when the eras are most receptive and the voice most fresh.
We made big assumptions about Cork too. Flaky. And without James Masters impotent. Since the 1999 final (lost to Meath) they had been in three semi-finals and lost them all. All three were against Kerry but in drawing conclusions we like to use broad brushstrokes; no need to examine in too much detail the complicated nuances of the relationship between those two counties.
And of course since 1999 Meath had been in just one semi-final, back in 2001, when they dismantled Kerry with such cool ruthlessness that Páidí Ó Sé and his selectors could just sit on the bench and watch impassively. Lesson: Cork don't do semi-finals well; Meath do.
It all added up. We got inside Croke Park and found it half empty and didn't blame the absentees. By the end of 70 minutes we actually envied them. Some semi-finals (often ones involving Cork) just die on their feet. This one expired in a novel way though. Meath just lost heart. And Cork did what Cork so seldom have done in recent years: they put a team away by just turning the screw remorselessly.
We sat and watched impassively and wondered if teams make their own character or, as we had always assumed, environment is really the determining factor. Back as long as we can remember Meath teams died with their boots on. Or they didn't die at all. Kevin Heffernan used to say you never really beat Meath - you just struggle past them.
Earlier this summer we'd had the sense that this Meath team were hewn from the same rock as their predecessors, and maybe in years to come they will resemble them more, but if that happens it will be an acquired trait, something born partly out of yesterday's happening, a game where Meath failed to do themselves justice and let their heads drop onto their chests.
Meath will deny they were complacent but they seemed to buy into the general feeling that Cork were ripe for the plucking.
They started well. A couple of wides. And then after a few minutes they were given the sort of gift Meath teams used to grab with both hands and gorge themselves on.
Graham Geraghty, a pantomime baddy loitering at the business end of the championship, was found on the ground beneath the Hogan. Noel O'Leary had apparently made good contact with a fist and dimmed some lights in Wonderland. A small shemozzle ensued. We all leaned forward in our seats.
It should have been a pivotal moment and may yet be if the referee is invited to reconsider the yellow card he issued.
We were reared on the thought that fighting never nonplussed or distracted Meath teams. Part of their native toughness was that they could just resume the game with even greater toughness and focus once some blows had been exchanged. Other teams tended to nurse their bruises and go to pieces for five or 10 minutes. It was part of the stoic appeal of Meath teams - that hardness, that implacability.
Instead under the deploring gaze of Colm Coyle, a man with an iron constitution which reflected that of his team-mates through the '80s and '90s, Meath conceded four of the next five points, being torn apart so indelicately at the back that two of the Cork scores came from balls being fisted over the bar as a player broke cover behind the full-back line and descended on goal.
Stephen Bray was malfunctioning too. Through one half of the Tyrone game he had looked merely human. Yesterday as he shot three wides in the first 20 minutes that impression came back to us.
Like Shane O'Rourke, he finished the day with two points to his name, a total which distinguished both men from their ailing colleagues, but those statistics hurt.
And Meath never really recovered. At one point late in the second half, Coyle sat down on a chair between his two selectors, a man pretty much out of options and bearing a curious resemblance to the Páidí of 2001.
Up the line Billy Morgan was animated and hungry, hugging the life out of every sub who came off the field, clenching his fists and driving his boys on.
The two men made more interesting viewing than anything their players were providing.
Cork roll on. Morgan will watch the circus that is a Dublin-Kerry semi-final unfold this week. He won't say, but it would be fascinating to know which side he would prefer in the final. Probably he would fancy Dublin more but there's enough divil in Billy to want to shoot for the moon.
There could be nothing sweeter in a lifetime of football than to beat Kerry in an All-Ireland final; nothing more bitter than to lose to them, not just in a final but for the third championship in succession.
At the end of the day it's about people. And at the end of a dull day that was enough consolation.
