Maybe, just maybe, it was the fates which ordained it all. Midway through the first half of Sunday's Ulster championship game at Casement Park the bright May sunshine faded ominously and the pitch was shrouded in gathering gloom. Minutes later hailstones were falling, at first intermittently but then in icy sheets. The deluge continued right up until the interval. Short of a bout of pestilence and a plague of locusts, this was enough of a biblical intervention to send Antrim on their way and out of the championship desert. Someone, somewhere was delivering a sign.

All the indications were that they might have managed it on their own anyway. The jungle drums had been beating in Belfast last week as covert groups of GAA aficionados gathered together and held conspiratorial, half-whispered conversations. Many could hardly believe what they were saying and what they were hearing as outwardly sane and rational observers posited the notion that Antrim could actually beat Down.

The notion that a county which has twice been top of the All-Ireland pile within the last decade could lose to one which had not won a single championship game in 18 long years was hardly worthy of consideration.

And yet there were believers. Antrim were All-Ireland B champions and on a modest upward curve while what had started out as Down's rebuilding process was beginning to resemble major reconstructive surgery as they meandered directionless through a National League campaign that saw them relegated. Most worrying for them was that while the age profile of the All-Ireland winning teams of 1991 and 1994 was increasing inexorably, the new faces who were being introduced were displaying a marked reluctance to bed down and mould together into a championship team. An All-Ireland minor title last year suggested a bright future but was of little use in the short term.

In the recent past this would not have presented a major problem and a team centred around the likes of Higgins, the McCartans and Linden would have ambled through early challenges like this confident that improvement would come with the warmer nights and extra training of June and July. Down have made a habit in recent times of stuttering their way through the championship preliminaries, all the while fine-tuning their engine for later in the summer.

But that carefully wound-up style of preparation is something over which management and players can always maintain control. The enduring fascination of competitive team sport is the way in which variables over which those same coaches and players have no control can rear their heads. Central among these is hunger. After two decades on the receiving end of jokes, jibes and, worst of all, pity, Antrim could reasonably have expected to have no problems in summoning up an appetite for 70 minutes of championship football.

For Down, though, it was different. Only Sean Boylan has been in charge of a county's football affairs for longer than Peter McGrath. The Down manager's difficulty was finding a way of injecting enough enthusiasm into a squad of players with a great number of miles on the clock while at the same time imbuing the novices with enough confidence for the tasks ahead. The problem was that with Down there appears to be no middle ground between those two extreme positions. In the half-forward line behind the 36year-old Mickey Linden last Sunday there were two graduates of last year's minor team, barely half his age. In between there was nothing and in the end that gulf proved too wide to bridge.

None of which should be used to disguise the extent of Antrim's achievement last Sunday. The conditions certainly helped because with forwards like Linden and Shane Mulholland, Down are most certainly a top-of-the-ground team. With the thunder, the lightning, the hailstones and the heavy rain, Casement Park seemed more like a venue for a meaningless league game in mid-November than a first-round championship meeting. In contrast to Down's diffident approach, Antrim harried, hassled and hustled with an unmatchable intensity.

There were times, particularly in the first half, when it seemed this eagerness would be their ultimate undoing. Their willingness to move the ball swiftly at dead-ball situations with quickly-taken free-kicks displayed an admirable keenness to get on with the job. But during a passage of play when three kicks sailed harmlessly into touch without another Antrim player getting near the ball, it became clear that the appropriate prescription should be more haste and a little less speed.

THE tide turned and the game was won in the first five minutes of the second half. Antrim bounded out of their blocks with three unanswered points in quick succession. Down's body language of sloping shoulders and bowed heads was interspersed with some spiteful tackling and they seemed to sense that the game was up from a long way out.

For understandable reasons that conviction took a little longer to spread through the Antrim diehards. They had travelled down this road of hope many times before only to be headed off at the pass. There had been days in Ballybofey, in Omagh and even in Newry last year when winning the game looked easier than losing it. But lose they did.

And as Down drove forward in desperation for the goal that would have forced a replay the prospect of yet another capitulation hovered. Hair, teeth and skin were flying as they adopted a novel style of zonal defence by getting 13 and 14 men behind the ball to protect their lead. The mental effort required was just as immense as the physical demands because this was a county that had forgotten how to win and had to confront that fear.

The end when it came was almost anticlimactic. This was an ignominious way for a Down team which was the best Ulster side of its generation to self-implode and it is unlikely that we will see many of its All-Ireland winners come next summer. As for Antrim, it looked for a few seconds as if they might not know how to celebrate. All the men and women from St Paul's, St John's and from Cargin who had driven to games during the years when it seemed nothing would ever change looked at each other almost disbelievingly. Then came the hugs and the throaty roars. It was the sight and the sound of deliverance.