Munster Fan's View: An elderly man walks into a fruit-and-veg shop in Dublin. He asks for half a head of lettuce. The new, young assistant refuses. It's scrawny winter lettuce, he explains, if he cuts it in half, no one will want the left-over bit.

The old fella persists - he lives alone, likes a salad, but doesn't need the full head. He's been coming into this shop for more than 40 years. Would the young man reconsider?

Elderly persistence wears down youthful resolve. The assistant says he'll go and ask the boss.

(Back of the shop)

"Boss, there's an ould gobshite looking for half a head of lettuce."

But as the words leave his lips, he senses that the elderly man has followed him, and has overheard. He adds, quickly: "And this gentleman has kindly offered to take the other half . . ."

They halve a lettuce and the customer goes home happy.

Boss: "You very nearly got yourself into trouble with one of my oldest customers there. But I like a young fella who thinks on his feet. Where're you from?"

Assistant: "Cork city, sir."

Boss: "And why'd you come up to Dublin?"

Assistant: "In Cork, sir, there's nothin' but hoors and hurlers."

Boss: "My wife is from Cork."

Assistant: "Which club did she play for?"

Prejudices, biases, disdains and downright grudges. And our caricatured notions of others. Cute Cork hoor, the Kerryman who'd buy and sell you and charge a fee both ways. Culchie, skanger, skobe. Reggie needs a Zimmer frame twixt scrums. Leinster are ladyboys, show ponies, D4 dilettantes. Donnybrook supporters are spoiled and fickle, soft city creatures, fair-weather fans who won't travel the hard yards. I speak as a long-time Cork-born culchie sufferer of many years standing on those terraces. Over and over, I watched in fascinated horror as a team with obvious talent blew game after game through irresolute fannying about and a disinclination to fix, focus, dog out a result.

The first time I saw something resemble steel enter the Leinster equation was when an army officer named Liam Toland arrived some years ago to bolster and stiffen the back row. It startled me not one tiny bit to discover he was from Limerick. It's not surprised me since to hear his sane and solid analytical skills deployed on Setanta, extolling the military coda of command, control, communication.

For years it was an anthropological wonder to behold the typical Leinster fan. Not the yummy mummies and their sheepskinned hubbies in the stand. It was young guys, each €15 lighter for the privilege, often with their backs to the action, posing and preening with their mates - a self-regarding parade of metrosexual humanity that made Ross O'Carroll Kelly look like a Young Munster lifer.

"Why come at all, guys?" I'd wonder.

"Why not go directly to Kiely's?"

I was missing the point, of course. Friday evenings in Donnybrook were a social occasion at which rugby was for many something of a sideshow, a sporting backdrop, a bit like the flatscreen flickering in the corner of a bar.

Coming from some 10 years of that class of experience, a wee bit of cynicism about "New Leinster" is understandable.

All's changed now, of course. Two brief cameos in Bath and Toulouse have apparently expunged the shameful shades of Perpignan - in Dublin, forgawdsake! - in an earlier semi. The nouveaux faithful now queue for tickets and moan at under-supply, just like Munster hardliners. Some even borrowed against the SSIAs this year and travelled. Abroad.

(I could at this point say I hope it stays fine for them on 23/4. But I'd be speaking with forked tongue in both cheeks.)

Are we free from sin? We're a certainty to the point of self-assured arrogance at times (any offence caused is entirely intended, to be honest). That's from a faith that borders on messianic. There's a loyalty and connectedness between terrace and turf that transcends mere love - extraordinary team efforts by ordinary men have earned that. Hard.

There was 31/10, we've had Lille, Gloucester, Sale . . . We're a mixed-race tribe, and chapters now exist in Connacht, Leinster and Ulster as well as Britain and the mainland - that motley caravanserai traverses Europe - for pool games, mind, for the shared human experience as much as for the matches themselves. Now, and frankly also into the future, that's probably beyond a metropolitan team.

When we win on Sunday, there will be no triumphalism. We'll have boats, trains and planes to book, tickets to chase for Cardiff. Such a Final Feeling, we do understand, is beyond New Leinster's ken.

Defeat? It'd take a miracle or Joël Jutge.

If such an injustice does come about, we may, mind, be poor losers. As they say in Cork - it's because we have so little practice, boy.