This time last year, a letter appeared in the Irish Examiner suggesting that Munster rugby had "lost the plot". It was written by a Corkman, who was complaining not about the team's defeat to Leicester a few days beforehand, but about the decision to redevelop and upgrade Limerick's Thomond Park, thereby officially enshrining it as Munster's spiritual home, writes Frank McNally.
The authorities had fallen for the "myth" of the Limerick venue, he suggested, at the expense of the reality that Cork's Musgrave Park was better located, better attended, and just as intimidating for visiting teams.
At the time, I saw the letter as evidence that my grim prediction of eight months earlier was coming to pass. Back then, in the wake of Munster's triumph in the Heineken Cup final, I had suggested the next item on the province's agenda would be the split.
There was only so long that Cork people - not hitherto known for modesty and self-restraint - could put up with playing a secondary role in the Munster legend. The obsession with winning the European Cup had been a unifying factor. Now, having at last secured the Holy Grail, Leesiders could slaughter Thomond's sacred cow. Soon, there would be two teams representing the province: Continuity Munster, playing out of Limerick, and Real Munster, based in the People's Republic.
Now, another year on, the split has still not happened, and it may finally be time for me to admit I was wrong. I can't speak for the Examiner's letter-writer. But in one respect, at least, he can claim to have been right. This time last January, Munster rugby had indeed lost the plot.
The plot is that of Angela's Ashes, more or less. Limerick, rain, grinding poverty, more rain, oppression, suffering beyond endurance, even more rain; and, finally, the triumph of the human spirit. There you have the outline both of Frank McCourt's famous book and of Munster's involvement in the Heineken Cup. It's no coincidence that the two phenomena first appeared around the same time.
But the team had certainly lost the plot last January. Despite playing the final group match at home and under water, Munster had suffered Heineken Cup defeat at Thomond for the first time. The boys in red were already through to the quarter-finals, of course, so the game lacked the struggle-for-survival element on which they thrive. Even so, there was a fear that Leicester had robbed Thomond of its mystical powers, all the more so because the game had been played in atrocious conditions.
Remember the opening passage of Angela's Ashes? As befits the second-most important character in the book - after Angela - the personality of his home city's weather is established on the very first page: "Out in the Atlantic Ocean, great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick. . It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges. . .
"From October to April the walls of Limerick glistened with the damp. Clothes never dried: tweed and woollen coats housed living things, sometimes sprouted mysterious vegetations. In pubs, steam rose from damp bodies and garments, to be inhaled with cigarette and pipe smoke laced with the stale fumes of spilled stout and whiskey. . .
"The rain drove us into the church - our refuge, our strength, our only dry place. At Mass, Benediction, novenas, we huddled in great damp
clumps. . .Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain." I thought of that passage on Saturday while watching Munster's latest do-or-die game. On some parts of the Thomond pitch, visibility was severely reduced due to fog, as warm air rising from the players' bodies collided with the cold rain washing in from the Atlantic. Even through the clouds of steam, however, it was soon clear that the reputation of Limerick and its holy water was about to be restored.
The moment of confirmation, loudly recognised as such by the crowd, was the sin-binning of Lawrence Dallaglio. The Wasps captain has a head on him that could have been chiselled by a semi-skilled stonemason. But as he walked slowly to the line, jeered by the home supporters, his features betrayed a certain vulnerability. It looked like he was suffering from erosion.
Truth to tell, there was an inevitability about the result from the start. After 10 years of Munster qualifying for the knock-out stages, the dramatic tension is not what it was. We know now that the human spirit will triumph eventually. So the only real suspense on Saturday arose from wondering if Cork supporters would finally exhaust their capacity for self-effacement and launch into the "Banks", perhaps when Donncha O'Callaghan - one of theirs - was named Man of the Match.
It didn't happen. The only song sung, as usual, was Fields of Athenry - which, while commemorating the poverty, oppression, and survival-against-the-odds that is central to the Munster rugby fan's self-image, has the added advantage of being geographically neutral.
So Munster rugby has recovered its plot. The province remains unified, is still synonymous with gritty Limerick, and is through yet again to Europe's last eight. Meanwhile, poor old Leinster appears condemned forever to be the southern province's reverse-image: winners in life, losers on the pitch. You should never underestimate the power of a good story.