I had a few letters last week, all of them dealing with the one theme: Michelle Smith de Bruin. I had vowed not to mention MS de B for at least six months, but disparaging mention of herself crept under the radar and into last Monday's column, drawing swiftly dispatched arrows from the sporting equivalent of the Flat Earth Society.

It was an unwelcome distraction. The week was to be given to the gentle contemplation of the prospects for yesterday's hurling and to the scriptwork for my film, which is a sort of tribute to the barn-raising scenes in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Witness, whereby Bernard O'Byrne and eircom shareholders raise a stadium in an afternoon while the womenfolk make the sandwiches and journalists look on admiringly.

Readers' letters are the cruellest reminder that the customer isn't always right. It was deemed by this week's posse of epistles that I had done enough kicking of Michelle Smith de Bruin to last me a lifetime (as if they'd know when enough is enough), and that now, greedily, I was kicking her "when she was down". Then there was the clincher, the punchline: she might be innocent, so "put yourself in her shoes then".

Indeed. Having hacked through the forensic jungle of the case for three years I might do just that. If she is innocent, I will wear her flipflops and her lycra bathing suit to every formal occasion and job interview I attend for the rest of my life. I will also drink a warehouse worth of her nominated shampoo and will tote barrels of asses milk, drawn perhaps from my own ample teat, for her to bathe in. I will stand at the end of her road in my flipflops and lycra suit and warn her - as Gaeilge - if she is about to have unexpected visitors.

I was going to write back and say all those things, but then a more mature thought trespassed: why waste good stuff on private correspondence? You have 1,200 words to fill every Monday morning, and the hoors are only going to complain anyway, so . . .

And not long after that digression another thought came around the corner. (You don't have any for years, and then three or four thoughts come along together like warts on a child's finger.) Why do people with a passing interest in sport cling to the innocent, silverscreen notions of heroism while those with a deeper interest are uniformly disenchanted?

The things which underpinned and sustained a true love of sport, rather than the rah-rah good-times and bar-extensions sort of interest, are under threat at present.

I had a teacher long ago, a Mr Greene, who had the thankless task of force-feeding maths theorems into a brain which was the intellectual equivalent of a wired jaw. Greene was a funny fellow, but he used to caution us occasionally about being able to recognise the difference between people who say cynical things and people who live their lives cynically.

Sport is being devoured by people who live their lives cynically, cheats who beat their chests piously, agents who grub on either side of the street, suits who suck the joy and the last dollar out of everything. Those who care passionately about sport are being beaten back by a coalition of those at the centre who live cynically and those on the fringes who just want the good times and the bunting.

And today, apart from greed, drugs and the immaculate conception of Gary Lineker, there are few things which sport can offer us to believe in anymore. Hurling is one of them. Watching Clare's great adventure wind down yesterday, it was impossible not to counterpoint the rude health of hurling with the sickness which rots most other sports.

It was oddly depressing, for instance, to watch from a distance the writhing and squirming in the American press corps as Lance Armstrong pedalled away from the peloton in the Tour de France.

The Americans, who in fairness take sports journalism as seriously as they take general journalism, could cope in a cold-eyed way with scandals from Flo-Jo to Michelle Smith to Dennis Mitchell. But Lance Armstrong looked too much like wholesome white bread. For many who know cycling, his story was too good to be true. For many in the journalism game it was too good not to be true, the celebration reflex was too strong.

We don't know if Armstrong took drugs. The evidence is a good deal more circumstantial than it was when people started asking questions about Michelle Smith, for example, but the very fact that there was a debate about Armstrong tells us something about how far we have come and how far we have to go.

Just as bad Irish journalists once accused the American media of creating a campaign against Michelle Smith, so lousy American hacks accused the French of orchestrating a campaign against Armstrong. As if the French, who are more informed about and more in love with cycling than just about any nation on earth, were incapable of celebrating a non-French winner.

THE POINT is that the cynics have all but won. We can't believe in anything but mediocrity anymore. And nobody cares. If Lance Armstrong did conquer cancer and then came back as a better and a stronger cyclist and won the Tour de France, he can no longer expect the band to strike up a merry tune. We've been duped so many times.

Everyone has. The people who dubbed Shirley Babashoff Surly Shirley when she complained about the East Germans who prevented her from becoming one of the greatest Olympians ever were suckered. Those of us who sat up late and cheered Ben Johnson home as the good guy who shut Carl Lewis up. Those who sat glued for sunny weeks to their televisions watching the tour wheel around France, they were short-changed too. It was a sham and a scam. Like Michelle, like Ben, like the others.

The cynics have robbed us of the right to celebrate before the stewards' inquiry, the drug test or the court case. Does anyone really believe in cyclists, sprinters, throwers, gridiron footballers, rugby union prop forwards, weightlifters or Everton avoiding the drop?

Yesterday, at Croke Park, we didn't see a classic of hurling. We didn't even see a good game, but we saw something which we could believe in and identify with. There were passions and there were tears and all around us we could see over 54,000 people caught up in it, without once having to worry if they were going to feel stupid afterwards.

It seems a bland thing to say, but there are no heroes left like hurlers. With one game left in the greatest decade the game has known, it seems like time to note that hurling has never short-changed us, scandalised us or lied to us. How many sports can we say that about?