One year on from Ulster's European Cup win it is clear there has been no sheepskin revolution. Despite the rash predictions made in the heady aftermath of last winter's roller-coaster campaign, rugby is no more the game of the people here than it was 12 months ago.

Legions of newly-converted rugby fans do not wander the streets in over-sized, fur-lined coats and swigging from hip flasks; for the most part, it is as if that winter Saturday afternoon at Lansdowne Road last January never happened.

With hindsight, it is clear the Ulster bandwagon was always going to collapse under the weight of expectations hitched to it. The whole package was just too easy and too comfortable for the Irish and English journalists who happened on this archetypal feel-good story of a humble rugby team uniting an entire community in pursuit of European glory. The grafting on of some wider, cross-community political significance was just never going to work.

In reality, the European Cup win passed by most people here, and the notion of some great communal coming together was the stuff only of media fantasy. No age-old barriers were broken down. There was no mass reconciliation. The only people who were reunited were the old grammar school boys who bumped into each other in the crowded bar on the train to Dublin and swapped gin and tonics and boring business stories for the rest of the journey.

Sporting success tends to have a detrimental effect on long-term memory. In all the hype, it has been conveniently forgotten that the beginning of Ulster's European campaign last autumn was greeted with a fair degree of indifference. Ravenhill will always have its die-hards, and they were joined by few others as Ulster made a stuttering start.

Some innovations in training methodology by the coach Harry Williams sparked an improvement on the pitch, and attendances did grow, but it wasn't until the knockout stages that the support showed any signs of moving out of its traditional heartland. Whether all those new arrivals will be back this season for the slog of the pool games over the next few months remains to be seen.

After an indifferent interprovincial series, it is already obvious that Ulster may have difficulties reaching last year's heights. Last Saturday night's defeat in France by Bourgoin may have been a further portent of things to come, and the visit of Wasps this Friday looks equally problematic. So, if a European Cup defence is effectively over before it has gathered any momentum, how likely is it that Ulster rugby will be able to reach out and beyond its traditional constituency?

The European Cup win was illuminating in so many ways. In positive terms, it highlighted the residual goodwill that exists here towards sporting success, regardless of which quarter it comes from. The support for Northern Ireland's World Cup exploits in the early 1980s was one example of the connections that could be made. More recently, the four successive All-Irelands by Ulster counties in the early part of this decade revealed a degree of interest, albeit at armchair level, in Gaelic football that nobody thought existed outside the GAA community.

But there were also negative aspects. Most obviously, it pointed up the extent to which rugby is a prisoner of its history and tradition. Its lifeblood has been the private, largely Protestant grammar school structure here, and, while those breeding grounds have produced generations of interprovincial and international players, the game has struggled to move beyond their confines. That was fine as long as rugby could maintain its elevated status and the production line of players continued. But changes in the last decade have generated new challenges.

One is that the demands of the professional game and the general raising of standards have rendered the Corinthian ideals of a training session on Wednesday afternoon and a Schools Cup game on the Saturday largely obsolete. Another is that rugby's pre-eminence among its old constituency is under attack from the obvious attractions of the other sports competing for the same small pool of players. In that context, the stark choice is between modernisation or decline.

At club level the game here is moribund. In Belfast, it has been clear for a long time that there are too many clubs for the catchment area, both of players and of supporters. Already some have amalgamated and more mergers are on the way. Outside of Belfast, Ballymena and Dungannon are known and respected throughout the country, but they too are struggling. Home attendances at All-Ireland League games last season were in the hundreds rather than the thousands, and neither club seems to have captured the imagination of their towns. The most telling thing is that they tend to be clubs for the members rather than for the people, and seem pretty content to leave things that way.

The appointment of development officers by the IRFU does at least indicate a willingness to address the problem at an administrative level. Their goal has to be to encourage the promotion of the game at primary school level, and not just in those schools that have been traditionally strong in the sport. And then a link has to be made between the schools and the clubs in their immediate area.

The interesting thing for the outsider looking-in is the amount of time spent in Ulster and Irish rugby circles in long and exhaustive handwringing exercises that produce plenty of sound and fury but precious little else. Working parties are set up, debates are carried on in the opinion columns and letters pages of the newspapers and animated discussions are held in clubhouse bars up and down the country. But while the other major sporting organisations on this island build new stadiums or address the underlying problems with the rules or with skill levels, rugby performs the sporting equivalent of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

The elevation of Ulster to the status of European champions provided the perfect opportunity for rugby here to move out of its ghetto and start making connections with the wider community. It is too early to say that the opportunity has been totally squandered, but the lack of meaningful progress up until now seems to suggest that may be a bridge too far.