Cork, bless them. Active participants in the only big surprise of last season's championship, they helped get this year off to a cracking start by sensationally losing the first serious match of the current campaign. After the predictability of last summer - which, in an act of modern heresy, saw the hurling championship overshadowed by its football equivalent - this year already looks more appetising.

What happened was particularly interesting in this, the final year of the current championship format. Whereas there's no doubt that the knockout system militates against teams getting anything even approaching satisfactory programmes of matches and grossly undersells the spectator appeal of the championship, it is exciting.

Limerick supporters were exhilarated on Sunday not just because the county had brought to a halt a depressing sequence of championship defeats. They were also celebrating the liberation of the province from one of the big names thought likely to dominate the Munster series.

Cork's exit was a cause for jubilation in all the counties still involved in the championship and, unlike next year, they will not be returning for a second shot. It's easy to lament this drastically reduced scope for meaningful upset but Sunday, for all its joys, shouldn't be the exclusive basis of a major national competition.

Sudden death means that good teams can on a given day lose to opponents who aren't as good. This isn't to dispute Limerick's credentials. On the day they deserved to win but the principle that the better team sometimes doesn't win is central to the charm of knockout competition.

But a sport's premier championship should really be geared to ensuring the best team wins rather than to facilitating their ambush. Again it is important to emphasise that this is a general, not specific, argument.

Maybe underneath it all, Cork are the best side in the country and in a differently structured championship could have proved as much - but probably not. The point is that on the basis of only one match, we'll never know - which is cavalier treatment for one of hurling's biggest attractions in a field of roughly eight.

Yet the glory of a really big upset is vivid and enhanced under the current structure. As is often pointed out, surprises are surprises because hardly anyone sees them coming. And last Sunday conformed to that in spades. What could possibly have pointed to Limerick winning?

You can say Cork wintered in mediocre enough fashion and gave poor displays in National League matches against Wexford and Tipperary and failed to make the playoffs. But on that criteria, Limerick had even less to recommend them. An even more disastrous run-in, including the now notorious hammering handed down by Clare, culminated in a close call against Meath.

Maybe Cork were complacent. They deny it but teams always do. Complacency doesn't always manifest itself in comfortable thoughts and breezy arrogance. Tom Carr said that when the Dublin side he captained were closing in on the 1992 All-Ireland final, they watched Donegal defeat Mayo in a semi-final of unsurpassed wretchedness.

Afterwards they left convinced they could beat the pick of both teams, if not their combined numbers. For the fortnight before the final, he said, Dublin kept emphasising that Donegal would be formidable opposition - his point being that trying to convince yourself that your opponents are serious is no way to prepare for an All-Ireland.

Earlier in the same year, on the way to the Munster final which they astonishingly lost to Clare, Kerry footballers warned each other that they didn't want to end up as the first team to lose a final to Clare in 75 years. But they did.

As Eugene McGee - no stranger to surprising Kerry - put it at the time: "After decades of hammering Clare, how could they not be complacent going into the match".

Yet what role could there be for complacency when after a frenzied hour's hurling, Cork took a one-point lead with the wind at their backs?

In one sense this is as good as it gets for Limerick. Even if they proceed to an All-Ireland final, they won't be such long shots for a match again this season. There will be no element of surprise. But look at the upside. The young team can be expected to come on a ton after winning in such celebrated circumstances.

Even if the format is suspect, the freshening of the hurling scene with what looks like another breakthrough is to be welcomed hugely. It is also deserved reward for Eamonn Cregan. Obviously distressed - a bit too publicly for the taste of some Offaly players - by directing the defeat of Limerick in the 1994 All-Ireland, Cregan took on the team at the end of a cycle.

The creation of a new side in his own image - tactical, fast-moving and nerveless - has reinvigorated hurling in Limerick and elsewhere no matter what the rest of the championship holds in store.

e-mail:smoran@irish-times.ie