Locker Room: After All-Ireland finals there is an odd little ritual to be endured by hacks of the print and broadcast persuasion. We pile down from the seventh floor of Croker, shoehorning ourselves into the lift as if it were taking the last elevator out of Saigon.

When the doors open again in the bowels of Croke Park, we start the Heart Attack Derby, every hack galloping down a great, broad access tunnel where the team buses park, barrelling through a yellow door and on up a narrow corridor, swinging around to the right down a long, narrow corridor to that broad tunnel beneath the centre of the Hogan Stand, the tunnel which the players use for coming on and off the pitch.

When we get there the speeches are usually in mid flow and we stand getting our breath and being badgered by security people who for some reason want us all to go back and clog up the narrow corridor. Eventually we do this, but for a while we stand and watch the faces of the men who have just won the All-Ireland.

There they are, above us on the steps, leaning forwards to watch their captain accept the cup and say his few words. You look at them and wonder what exactly goes through their heads just then. These seconds, when the cup is about to be lifted, when the job is done, when the losers are still on the field and the crowd is still noisy, these are the seconds of pure joy that you hope every season builds to.

Yesterday, as Jackie Tyrell prepared to hoist the silver, we could watch players tousling JJ Delaney's head, could see Henry Shefflin chattering away to younger players and Richie Power leaning over the wall preparing to drop his hurley and helmet into the tunnel bellow.

They made for a long, ascending line of happy faces, but they were Kilkenny faces and, as such, they radiated serious satisfaction rather than delirious joy. They didn't just find themselves in Croke Park in this position yesterday, they were born to it, reared to it and pushed to it.

Beneath them, where the tunnel meets the pitch, Seán Óg, one of the great sportsmen of this or any generation, waited politely for the formalities to end. He looked up at Tyrell, who succeeds him as All-Ireland-winning captain, and smiled ruefully as hands reached in to tousle his hair and to slap his back.

Beside him, a step or so away, stood a man with a pink face and a black cap. Brian Cody's features faced upwards in expectation of the moment when Jackie Tyrell would lift the cup. When it happened, when the first Village man since Cody himself in 1982 lifted the trophy, the Kilkenny manager leapt from the ground once, landed and leapt again. Pure joy. Innocent joy.

Joy, and a moment when you see all the weight the manager of a serious hurling county carries on his shoulders. There's a little window in an All-Ireland-winning year when that weight is lifted, when there are no more snipers in the ditch, no more pressures and crises and worries, a moment when one of your players, perhaps a clubman of yours, mounts the Hogan Stand steps and clears his throat, "A chairde . . ."

A few minutes later Brian Cody says it doesn't matter that it was Cork, that it was the three-in-a-row. You have to make up your mind whether to believe him. Cork have been Cody's sparring partners forever. As a player, he wrestled with Cork, almost always Cork: two colleges finals, two minor All-Irelands, the senior All-Irelands of 1978, 1982 and 1983, the under-21 All-Ireland of 1975. Management brought the continuing tango with the rebels.

Yet when we gather around him in the tunnel afterwards to hear him say that Cork's position on the cusp of the pantheon was nothing to do with Kilkenny's motivation, that his side had wanted to win purely for the sake of winning, it was possible to say, perhaps! That Cork had ended Kilkenny's own three-in-a-row tilt with equally cold intent two years ago had nothing to do with any of it? Maybe.

It could just be true. The sweetness of ending Cork's run could be incidental to the pleasure Cody tastes this morning. There is a purity to his enjoyment of hurling which doesn't make him naive or make his sides soft, but which lights him up occasionally.

He came to our club on the northside of Dublin a couple of Christmases ago to give out juvenile medals. Nothing in it for him except a drive in the dark and some genuine thank yous. People spoke for a long time afterwards not just about the passion with which Brian Cody spoke but the genuine enjoyment he seemed to get out of being in a hall full of kids. He left behind a residue of enthusiasm which made everyone wish the season was only starting and that Cody's passion could be transfused into every young team.

Watching him leap up and down yesterday you could sense the depth of his passion. Here was a man whose father was chairman of James Stephen's for 19 years, watching a panel he had managed being led to victory by a James Stephen's man. His son, Donnacha, an injury victim, was among those on the steps. Another All-Ireland medal into the Cody house.

You looked at Brian Cody yesterday and you could believe it was just about the positives, just about the small good things. He lives 60 yards from where he grew up, teaches in the school where he learned his sums. But his adventure has been epic.

He'll be gracious when the Marble City cheers tonight, and probably he won't even think of the Monday night back in 1978 when he was barracked by a section of the crowd when the team come home after losing the All-Ireland. Kilkenny played Cody as a makeshift full forward. Cody bore the brunt of native frustrations. He won't consider too much the contumely which occasionally gets heaped on Donnacha from the nameless assassins on websites and the big mouths on crowded terraces.

The epic nature of his adventures in hurling place those pygmies in their proper context. Cody manages in Expectation Central, a place where the dogs in the street not only have an opinion but probably played underage for the county. When Kilkenny lose, he doesn't drive home behind smoked windows to the comfort of a gated community. He goes home and faces the music that his disgruntled countyfolk make.

He once said that the idea of pressure mystified him.

"I don't feel it in the job I'm doing. People talk about it alright. I'd say you feel pressure if you are doing exams and you haven't done the work. That's pressure. Hurling? It's about putting a lot in and preparing well. As a person, I don't feel pressure."

That was three years ago, and probably Brian Cody was telling the truth then. This year, though, he has got to know the bracing personality of pressure. Kilkenny are never really written off for All-Ireland titles, but within the county borders there was doubt this year. This player and that player wouldn't do. Cody had gone on too long. Perhaps he could no longer see the wood for the trees.

Yesterday was his greatest triumph. Kilkenny have been far from settled all year. They were unusually inexperienced for a stripy side going into an All-Ireland final, they had lost JJ Delaney and were attempting their first post-DJ Carey All-Ireland win. They were playing the undisputed masters of clinical, cerebral hurling.

Brian Cody is not the most cuddly or cosy media figure, and Kilkenny won't be the most popular All-Ireland winners. They offered lessons for us all though. They didn't win yesterday because of what they did last week or last month in training. They didn't win because they were obsessed with stopping Cork.

They won because of what they have been doing since they could began to walk. They won because of the excellence of their passion, because they have discovered the secret of passing on the inheritance of hurling.

And they won because they have in Brian Cody the perfect example of how one can live an epic and adventurous life without ever travelling over a sea.

He and John Allen walked the little corridor yesterday after the game visiting each others dressingrooms. Two teachers, two men for whom the game is transcendent. It was a good day and fine to see passion survive and prosper in this time of Mammon.