Hunger. Cold and clean. All day in Croke Park you could hear southern stomachs rumbling like those of ravenous urchins.

Every clash, every high ball, every chase and scrap they were contesting like starving wolves.

You could hear the hollow thunder in Cork's gut and hear the soft flapping underbelly of the great, but tired, champions chasing after them.

Decency suggested that you look away. Cork's hunger was so feral and Kilkenny's demise so complete. A yearning for fascination demanded you watch. Just to record. Eight points between them. Cork swaggering again.

Hurling between Cork and Kilkenny is never simple and seldom novel. History and tradition provide heavy preludes to any discussion.

Yesterday's All-Ireland final in Croke Park had all the trappings. Two teams vying for the honour of having won the most championships. One looking for the mythical three-in-a-row. An eventful recent history. Handle carefully.

This wasn't beautiful but it was war. Hard and unforgiving. Cork triumphed in a game that compensated for its lack of elegance with a surfeit of passion and intensity - never more so than in the white-knuckle second half when Cork cut loose and just never stopped.When the whistle blew they were eight points ahead.

Kilkenny had submitted.

The final 30 minutes made the game compulsive viewing. Cork burned with the heat of a kiln. We'd said for a month that Cork's forwards were too orthodox to trouble Kilkenny's fabled back line and their adhesive marking.

We were wrong of course. In that second half Cork scored nine points without reply and even from high in the stands you could hear the gentle lapping sound of Kilkenny's confidence as it seeped away.

The weather had a sense of history at least. The sky was grey as smudged newsprint all day and for every person who wondered if the elements wouldn't suit Kilkenny better there was somebody to counter that when Cork beat the Cats in the 1999 final the weather was doing worse things to the occasion.

In the end, it was easy to believe that Cork would have won if the game had been played on a glacier during a blizzard.

The Croke Park surface which made some of the great hurlers of the age look like hogs on ice made that conclusion a little easier to reach, but Cork's hunger was the defining element of the game.

When they spoke to each other beforehand they were reminded again and again that second chances seldom come and that having lost the provincial final to Waterford they were on their second, second chance.

In such circumstances, their viability as a team was on the line.They played that way.

Backs-to-the-wall hurling. Pressuring, harrying and hassling.

Every Cork training session with Donal O'Grady is a return to the basics. Hooking. Blocking. The arts of stopping the other team playing and then earning the right to do so yourself.

Kilkenny suffered. From early in the second half you could see the little distortions of mind that confidence brings. Instead of spreading out and playing the ball wide, Kilkenny concertinaed. Their compressed, goal-hungry shape made Cork lives easier.

There was the rust, too, which eats away, not at any particular part of the machinery of a team, but at its collective working. Kilkenny are a long time on the road. Long seasons and short winters. There was always going to come a day when they reached for their ammo and found they'd run out.

Then, of course, there was the jarring shoulder of perspective that hit the champions with the news that Richie Mullally, father to two of the Kilkenny panellists, had died on Saturday night. Even for a great team, as Kilkenny have been, it was too much.

Through the second half little fragments of the game seemed to be adding up. All in Cork's favour too. Kieran Murphy's first point, a languid stroke from 30 yards and no Kilkenny man bothering him. A wonderful Niall McCarthy point scored off the stick on his left-hand side while on the run.

A few frees given away for over-aggressive defending on the bodies of Kieran Murphy and Joe Deane. A sublime reaction save from Donal Óg Cusack after a sublime reaction shot from Henry Shefflin.

On it went. Each little moment bringing Cork closer to the tipping point. It finished with a touch of majesty - Brian Corcoran scrapping like a terrier for the ball in the corner of the Hogan Stand and the Canal End. Emerging suddenly from the ruck with ball in hand, he popped it between the posts from the most unbelievable angle.

Somewhere on Hill 16 a young man will have noted the irony. When Setanta Ó hAilpín left for Melbourne last winter, Cork accepted he was irreplaceable and the players vowed to each up their performance by five per cent. And then they pulled Brian Corcoran from the scabbard.

Setanta made it home, catching a late flight on Friday night. For superstitious reasons he watched from the Hill wearing the jersey his brother Seán Óg wore in the All-Ireland semi-final.

He saw Seán Óg hurl like a hurricane in the first half and would have appreciated Corcoran's sweet grace note late on. Setanta, one of the Cork players with nothing to prove after last year's All-Ireland, saw his colleagues make their own point.

It was a day of quiet personal fulfilment for Donal O'Grady, Cork's intense manager.

Yesterday morning, he hovered over a huge chasm. He could be remembered for bringing Cork to successive All-Irelands and losing them, or he could go down as having engineered one of the second act recoveries.

"Donal Óg's save was the turning point for me. He made a point-blank save from Henry Shefflin and if they had got that score it would have been crucial.

"I think the score that stands out was Tom Kenny's great run and point. Seven points up. I felt we weren't going to let it slip there. We'd knuckled down."

Cork's 29th All-Ireland.

To a man they said beforehand that the statistic, the record meant nothing. That was then. This is now.

The People's Republic of Cork have just annexed hurling.