LockerRoom:  In times of grief we seem to find comfort in the most banal expressions. Lacking words to explain ourselves adequately, we hide behind threadbare mumbles.

We whisper about being sorry for the troubles of the bereaved, we wonder why the good die young, and in the case of a sportsperson we rub our chins and say that, well, it puts it all in perspective.

It doesn't of course. The passing of Cormac McAnallen doesn't put anything in perspective except perhaps our own fragile mortality. The sport he loved and devoted himself to doesn't shrink in importance because he is gone. It won't be unseemly for football to be played again and for Tyrone people to lose themselves in the passion of it. It will be fitting and welcome.

The size of the space Cormac McAnallen leaves behind tells us lots about the sort of person he was and his understanding of the true perspective in which to view the game he played. He leaves behind much, much more than an empty number-three jersey hanging on a peg. He bequeaths a sense of the GAA itself, a glimpse of its immense possibilities. His death and the magnitude of the mourning which greeted it give us some feeling for the manner in which the GAA is a network of social capillaries linking community to community, giving what would be mute parishes a form of expression and identity.

The sense of loss and bewilderment which prevailed last week wasn't just prodded by the fact Cormac McAnallen was a fine footballer and a likeable young man. There was something else about him, something old-fashioned and all too rare. Speaking to people about his death drew out various responses but a common thread among many was to wonder were they doing enough, were they putting enough back in.

I met a man who had abandoned primary schoolteaching for accountancy and had suddenly begun to feel the loss of connection, the withdrawal of contribution. I met others who had given up coaching or mentoring and felt suddenly overwhelmed, not perhaps by guilt, but by a sense of displaced value. Watching reality TV wasn't the same thing as living a real life.

And guys who played and quit early, they were wondering why they weren't still going bursting their lungs till they could go no longer. On Saturday in this paper Brian O'Driscoll spoke of the effect the week had on the Irish rugby team.

The sudden, winding, debilitating effect of a death like Cormac McAnallen's is due to the sense of familiarity and identification we all have with the town of Eglish. We share a unique sporting passion which overlaps into the social and the cultural.

In an era of squinting windows and howling alarm sirens and fearful, isolated individuals, nothing else brings us together so often and so happily. The country didn't lose some distant icon last week, it lost the sort of young man every community thinks it doesn't have enough of. It lost a young fella that even those who had never met him felt they knew.

Things - as in the GAA, as in Tyrone's All-Ireland win, as in the pride in parish, club and county etc - aren't put into any diminished perspective by Cormac McAnallen's passing. It's impossible to imagine that any part of him would want them to be. His sporting life was about giving everything to those things and his professional life was already patterned on giving back whatever joy he had taken from them.

There's a poem by AE Housman called To An Athlete Dying Young, where Housman permits a small, cynical streak to poison his own sentiment. He writes of a gathering at an athlete's funeral: Shoulder high we bring you home/and set you at your threshold down/townsman of a stiller town.

Eglish is a stiller town and Tyrone a stiller place this week but Housman missed the point. Smart lad, he wrote, to slip betimes away/from fields where glory does not stay/And early though the laurel grows/it withers quicker than the rose.

Cormac McAnallen died at the time of full bloom but there were more dimensions to his glory than Housman could ever have imagined. The games and the feel for them reach farther and deeper than the poet could understand. It was more than his mere fame that made people stop and think last week when they heard the news. The glory of an All-Ireland does not stay long. The glory of an honest, robust life is the community's glory.

We are all too blithe in this confused post-Celtic-Tiger time about examining the sort of people we are, the sort of people we have been and the type of race we are becoming. Our communal response to so many things is so self-interested and selfish as to be hideously shameful. There is a depressing, worshipful fascination with elites, a dull, unironic regard for the endlessly trivial, a depressed shuffle towards the mills of global homogenisation. We'd franchise ourselves and sell ourselves off by the kilo if we thought we could get away with it.

Cormac McAnallen was a living reminder that passion and community and love of a game aren't yet extinct. They are just the preserve of those people disenfranchised by the phone-in, premium-rate culture of cranks and sharks. He was a different sports star. Try explaining him to somebody not from this country.

Housman's athlete, like Cormac McAnallen, passed away with "early laurelled head" but in Eglish the laurels scarcely mattered. Perhaps there would have been no more laurels, no more All-Irelands, but they were always beside the point; those things were a happy bonus.

What made the difference was a full and passionate existence. Standing on a platform in Croke Park was the peak in a one-dimensional sense, but what the GAA and Eglish lost are decades of presence, years of getting back whatever it put into Cormac McAnallen, the chance to regenerate what is important.

Perspective. Cormac McAnallen's own perspective on life has been lost but if, this week, his passing can be said to "put things in perspective" perhaps the ability to see things his way is the perspective we should hope for.

The best commemoration of such a passionate life is passion itself. Tyrone GAA will be more vigorous and more visceral than ever before. Playing fields will sing with kids' voices again. There'll be rows and fights and good days and bad days. And perhaps, an unfashionable thought, people will start putting back what they once took out.

When it all begins again Cormac will be somewhere cheering from a hill.