All-Ireland Senior Hurling final: Success brings a quiet decay which leaves no visible marks. Cork came to Croke Park yesterday with the three-in-a-row notion gnawing at their insides.

Not that they spoke of it, but the whispers around the Lee were insidious. One more game and it's done, boys. Cork caught a sucker-punch crossing the border to immortality.

What an All-Ireland final this was. It is difficult to remember a game played with such exuberant passion, a game with hunger as its sole leitmotif. Kilkenny were ravenous, and they earned the sustenance of a 29th All-Ireland title by thinking hard and then going to work in a frenzy.

Blood and thunder. There has been a quiet theory in hurling circles this year that the way to stop Cork is to "make the game crazy". Just about everyone who has faced Cork this summer has attempted to do just that, but nobody until yesterday had the resources to do it properly. Kilkenny threw their bodies in on top of red jerseys and in front of swinging Cork sticks. They hooked, they blocked, they flicked, they tackled with demonic fervour.

First they stopped Cork from playing, then they hurled a little themselves and eventually wore Cork out like waves breaking down a rock. Cork's fabled resourcefulness in hard times got them a wonderfully worked goal towards the end, but it never looked like being enough.

Tommy Walsh, whose excellence was garnering its second All-Ireland, explained the method in the madness.

"We said before the game no matter what the story in the last 20 minutes that Cork had great belief. Did we have that belief in ourselves? We did," the half-back said. "We wanted to put it up to them in those 20 minutes. We did that today."

So even if the second half didn't quite match the intensity of the first, there was never a stage where things got so loosey goosey that Cork merely had to think their way out of trouble, banking points all the while until they were in the clear.

The Kilkenny gameplan was perfect, but there is such a distance from blue print to success that even if Brian Cody had held a press conference on Friday to announce how his team would be playing, the odds at the bookmakers would have remained unaltered.

Yet after two or three minutes we knew we were looking at something volcanic. John Tennyson, who dislocated his shoulder for the second time in his brief career during the All-Ireland semi-final, squared up to Niall McCarthy of Cork.

The pair ran at each other again and again like stags butting in the glen. If Tennyson had any thoughts for sparing his shoulder, he concealed them perfectly. Bang. Bang Bang. Game on.

Kilkenny refused to allow Cork to settle. The Kilkenny forwards switched positions with bewildering regularity. Seán Óg Ó hÁilpín found himself marking Eddie Brennan, Martin Comerford and Richie Power at different periods of the game.

Cork's half backs generally prohibit adequacy, let alone excellence among their markers. Yesterday Kilkenny, conscious of the influence of the Cork wing backs John Gardiner and Ó hÁilpín, just swamped them. Often Kilkenny had their corner forwards out 40 and 50 yards from goal just smothering them before they could set up plays.

So Cork found themselves in a quandary. They had less room to swing the hurl than they would have in a crowded phone box. Their hand-passing game was being massively disrupted.

"We said to ourselves beforehand that Cork play a lovely brand of hurling," said Henry Shefflin "They like giving it to one player who takes it on and than gives it to somebody else. We said we'd stay on our own men, track them all the time. It was hunger for the ball that drove us. We wanted it more."

So Cork's stars were starved. The starting full forward line mustered a point from play.

Brian Cody said afterwards that his team didn't go much in for analysis and tactical planning. Certainly hurling is a simple game, but a lot of thought went into yesterday's ambush. One of Cork's principal weapons through the fat years has been Donal Óg Cusack's puc outs. Cork even managed three points from their classic move of puc out, take, pass and shoot, but generally anything which was driven to the heart of the Kilkenny defence was broken down and cleared. Kilkenny were happy to let Donal Óg finds his corner backs with short passes and then ratchet the pressure from there.

In the end there was the margin of a goal between the sides, and while Kilkenny could argue that they were worthy of being more than a puc of a ball away from parity it seems fitting that it ended that way.

Aidan Fogarty's goal just before the half hour opened up that three-point lead and was a perfect illustration of Kilkenny's style. A high ball was tussled for between Comerford and Diarmuid O'Sullivan. It broke. Fogarty robbed it before Pat Mulcahy had fully reacted. A blur of movement and the ball was in the net. Three points in it.

Cork never got onto level terms after their tea. The energy didn't seem to be there. They switched to a longer, more direct game in the closing stages but they were always chasing. They chivvied out that wonderful Ben O'Connor goal with four minutes left, but by then Kilkenny were six ahead and as rampant as they could ever have hoped to be against Cork.

Minutes later it was over. We sat back in our seats and sighed. We had just witnessed an entire symphony played in allegro. Cork's three-in-a-row had been taken away. So had our breath.