Locker Room: Yesterday. All our troubles came home to stay. Yesterday came suddenly. Dawn breaking or whatever it is that dawn does and we are on the road to Ratoath in Co Meath for some camogie to mark the opening of their new ground.

Thought we were the Dubs coming down to help the cousins in the country. Realised when we got there and stood in their perfect, rolling acreage and loitered in their astonishing clubhouse that we were the Flintstones treated to excellent hospitality by the Jetsons.

Still. We are Dubs and it is our nature to be incorrigibly arrogant. Early afternoon and we're coming down Clonliffe Road, towards mecca and we're behind a cluster of maroon jerseys. The sun is shining.

The gods are in their heaven. We round the corner onto Jones Road. "There she is, boys," says one of the maroon jerseys and the group of them stood blocking the way gazing up at the elegant spine of Croke Park.

And being Dubs and being used to the sight of the place we pause and smile at the maroon-jerseyed men and think graciously to ourselves about how nice it is for them to be coming up from the country from their (surprisingly) lovely clubhouses and perfect pitches and to be seeing the wonder of Croke Park from time to time.

"There she is, boys." Sure that's what the big day out is all about.

It's coming on for five o'clock now. Wexford and Kildare are jousting away at the footie. It's the first weekend in June and Dublin are out of the Leinster football championship. Outgunned. Outthought. Outplayed. Out.

The next big thing on the sky-blue horizon is the qualifiers. The chicken-and-chips circuit of football. Dublin's slide to the hinterland of oblivion has been quick.

It all seems pretty silly now, doesn't it? The secrecy. The hostility to the media. The sun-blessed training camps. There were rumours during the week of Dublin players being virtually required to sign blood oaths that they wouldn't divulge the team to spouses, confessors, people holding guns to their heads.

The point being exactly?

Westmeath deserved their win in Croke Park yesterday. For a team who haven't quite had the nerve to make the breakthrough in recent years they were presented with so many invitations to break through yesterday that even they couldn't decline.

And they didn't just perform well on the field. Páidí Ó Sé was decisive and clever on the sideline.

Early on when Jason Sherlock and Alan Brogan were cutting loose he acted to stymie both. He made his first change after 22 minutes, replacing James Davitt at corner back. Another change on 31 minutes brought David Mitchell in. Those two switches were the foundation of Westmeath's victory.

It was fitting towards the end when Westmeath took the lead for the final time that it was Joe Fallon, another sub, who gave it to them.

Westmeath, their hand severely depleted by the loss of Rory O'Connell and Martin Flanagan, played what cards they possessed perfectly.

By contrast, Dublin struggled to think their way out of a hole. There were just 11 minutes gone when Dessie Dolan wriggled past Barry Cahill for his first point, a score which could have been a goal.

Perhaps the warning bells failed to sound because Sherlock went and scored three points on the trot, but when that sequence was over Dolan got on the inside of Cahill again and popped over the free he won.

Nothing was done. Nothing would be done. This was one of the Dublin selectorial coups. It backfired.

So did several other things. Springing Collie Moran as a forward didn't work. The endless obsession with proving that Bryan Cullen is also a forward looked misplaced when poor Cullen came off minutes before the end yesterday.

The hijacking of Conal Keaney looked justifiable through the league but after two well-conceived passes of Conal's went astray early on yesterday he seemed to lose confidence.

Nor did Dublin ever get any benefit yesterday from the pace of Senan Connell. As for the dropping of Mossy Quinn? Two years of juggling with the fella's confidence came to this?

As usual Dublin reached for Ray Cosgrove as soon as things went awry but it's two years since Ray had comic-strip superhero powers.

After the debacle against Armagh last summer Dublin needed to show some composure and wisdom on the sideline yesterday. That's what was most alarming about yesterday. It was a defeat Dublin should have thought their way out of.

Where it all goes now is anybody's guess. There was a feeling about Dublin this summer that all the secrecy and all the low-profile business might be leading somewhere. Perhaps a win at the start would lead to the sort of organic growth the team enjoyed in 2002.

At the end of that season Tommy Lyons, still a voluble presence in the warren beneath Croke Park, said almost as a throwaway that "your first year is always your best". How right he was.

We thought Dublin might grow with the summer, might expand with success and confidence.

Now the worry is that they will disintegrate in adversity. It's not a secret that big fissures opened up in the Dublin camp late last summer when they had exited the qualifiers. Senior players were unhappy. Some middle-level players felt cowed. Some wise and timely diplomacy from Dave Billings among others meant the fissures got plastered over.

And yet when the going got tough yesterday Dublin looked like a team with worries. They didn't unite in defiance. They looked brittle. Not quite believing in themselves and their right to win. When they went back to their clubs and homes and saloon bars last night who knows what dark mutterings they shared? Dublin teams aren't used, after all, to exiting Croke Park with the sound of booing ringing in their ears.

Last summer Armagh lost to Monaghan at an embarrassingly early stage of the championship and slowly they went on the Saturday night satellite circuit and put themselves back together. By the time they beat Dublin in Croke Park they were healed.

All that took a remarkable work of man management from Joe Kernan. He took a tired and beaten side and nursed them through a few rounds until they found a challenge which energised them. Kernan is the man who kept Crossmaglen interested for all those years. We should have known - maintenance is the speciality trick of his bag.

For Tommy Lyons the biggest challenge he has faced in football begins today. More than the players he manages, he looks like a man who has lost his confidence and swagger. Those are things Tommy needs badly. Some management careers are built on those qualities.

Yesterday. It was a day of learning and education for those of us whom the evening papers used call "metropolitans".

We went down to the Westmeath dressing-room and smiled on all those who were smiling. You could sense, nice people that they are, that they felt a little sorry for us.