MAYBE it's due to the mellowing of the year but it was impossible not to have sympathy for Tommy Dowd's plaintive bid for approval - not of course for himself but on behalf of the Meath team - during his acceptance speech in the Hogan Stand on Sunday.

It's one of the more ambiguous elements involved in becoming champions. To win, you have to beat someone and at times you won't be popular. The weekend was one of those 31 against one occasions when the entire country is ranged behind one of the teams and, by extension, against the other.

The fact that Meath are among football's aristocracy - albeit that 10 years ago they had the same number of All Irelands as Mayo but now have twice as many - would influence public sentiment but complicating matters further was the undeniable desirability of Connacht picking up an All Ireland for the first time in 30 years.

Dowd's reference to the fairly common view that it "would be good for the game" if Mayo had won initiated the reproachful line that Meath winning wasn't that bad for the game either.

He was right. It is in a number of ways' good that Meath are the new All Ireland champions. The county has set good example in a number of areas that others might profitably follow.

For a start, the county has a most effective trawling system at under age level. Set up over 10 years ago and operated by Matt Kerrigan, Paul Kenny, Pat O'Neill and others, it ensures that virtually no young talent slips through the net.

O'Neill, Meath's Central Council delegate, once explained how, one Sunday at Mass, he spotted a well built young man whom he didn't recognise. It was Hugh Carolan, then a pupil at Blackrock College with a blossoming rugby career, and O'Neill asked him did he play football.

Although Carolan never concentrated on senior inter county football, he was good enough to win an All Ireland minor with Meath in 1990.

Once identified, young players are coached and the county's record of success at minor and under 21 level speaks for itself: three Leinster minor titles, and two All Irelands, in four years at the beginning of this decade and five of the last eight provincial under 21 championships.

In tandem, Meath have never lost sight of the importance of the senior county team - both as a promotional tool and as a luminous aspiration for younger players. Their patience and nerve in persevering with Sean Boylan as manager despite the occasional siren call for his retirement, has now been rewarded.

Boylan's meticulous and innovative attention to detail helped shape an All Ireland team 10 years ago and since then, his experience has developed through a whole range of situations - winning All Irelands, losing them, losing Leinster etc - to the stage that he is now a more formidable operator than before.

Whether he now stays or goes remains to be seen but he deserves enormous credit for this season's achievement. It's almost as if he needed last year's 10 point thrashing by Dublin to prove to the county that a whole new structure was needed.

In the last 12 months, he stuck to his guns and put together a young team with only two survivors from the previous successes.

Left to their own devices, the young players have thrived on the responsibility and with five under 21s aboard, have won the All Ireland.

Eight of the players used on Sunday had played in a minor All Ireland final and so the continuity established has been impressive. Anyone watching the team during the league would not have been flabbergasted to be told that they were looking at future All Ireland champions but they would have been more than surprised to learn that the prize would come so soon.

It's unlikely we'll be judging this Meath team solely on the basis of a scrappy and error strewn pair of finals. They will surely return at a more accomplished stage of their development to give greater expression to their potential.

For Mayo, there's hardly any words that will console them for having blown an All Ireland not once but twice. They will be particularly aware of Meath's achievement in winning an All Ireland ahead of schedule.

For all the talk about the new, young Meath team, Mayo's actually has a marginally lower average age and they were within tipping distance of bridging a great gap. In their bottomless disappointment, they will know that nothing is guaranteed from now on - that they may never get a better chance of an All Ireland than that afforded them over the last couple of weeks.

In 1989 their predecessors, the Mayo team beaten by Cork, never returned to the big stage. Cork themselves have yet to improve on the current team's debut year in 1993 when they lost to Derry.

Even this year, Tyrone were hot favourites having lost an All Ireland by an unlucky and narrow margin. But they never made it back and now joint managers Art McRory and Eugene McKenna have stepped down.

All this will be running through John Maughan's head but it is hard to believe that so resourceful a manager and so impressively committed a team will not pick themselves up and apply themselves again to collecting that elusive All Ireland before the 50th anniversary of their previous championship success comes around in five years.

Finally, mellowness hasn't quite flooded me to the extent that the brass necked opportunism of the Fine Gael TD Frances Fitzgerald can be let pass unchallenged.

In an inventive piece of bandwagoning as the All Ireland replay drew near, the Dublin south east deputy railed against Croke Park for being unfair to women's sports and cited the postponement of the women's football final together with the decision to locate the camogie final attendance in the New Stand rather than the Hogan.

This expression of concern was evidently so urgent that it would brook no contribution from the organisations concerned.

The relocation of the camogie crowd in the New Stand - as well as moving supporters to the more modern facility - was so that the occasion would look better on television as the cameras located in the Hogan have in the past recorded the final against the backdrop of an empty stand.

Helen O'Rourke, president of the Ladies Gaelic Football Association, was on the radio a fortnight ago expressing relief that the women's football final was not to be offered the status of curtain raiser to the men's replay.

She made the point that the association - which is not part of the GAA - booked the date in question in the full knowledge that it was contingent on the men's final not being drawn.

Furthermore, the women's final is the biggest day of the year for the fastest growing sport in the country. As Ms O'Rourke pointed out, the VIP facilities that are at the LGFA's disposal on All Ireland final day would have been unavailable.

Accordingly, they preferred to preserve the integrity of their All Ireland arrangements rather than suffer many inconveniences so that they could become a much patronised side show before the "real" football got underway.