Locker Room:A good day for hurling. Seeing a Waterford man climb the steps in hurling's home to lift a national trophy for the first time in 44 years was a tonic for the game and an appetiser for the summer. A sea of white-and-blue hurling people covered the Semple grass without chastisement from the PA or fear of reprisal from the maors. It was just a good, happy day in the sun.

Sometimes, with respect to a defeated team and while tipping the cap to the rules about no shouting in the press box, it's hard not to be glad for a side when they do the business. This Waterford team have been carrying our goodwill on their shoulders for nine years or so now. For the last three or four years they have begun each season, according to us scribes anyway, with customer-loyalty points in the last-chance saloon.

The Munster titles which failed to provide enough momentum to get them to an All-Ireland final have long since been digested, and it seemed for quite some time that their best years would be spent as support performers for the Kilkenny and Cork double act.

Yesterday was so much more than "only the league". It was championship intensity. It was Semple Stadium. It was Kilkenny.

The last point is the most salient. In recent weeks Kilkenny have somehow come to be burdened with the reputation of "unbeatability".

There is no such thing as an unbeatable team and Brian Cody will have felt a little shiver run down his back any time he heard the word mentioned in association with his team. He still shudders about that ambush Galway launched some years ago when the last great lather about Kilkenny's unbeatability was at its most frothy.

Kilkenny were never unbeatable but Waterford will wake up this morning knowing they beat a side who wanted this league as much as they wanted it last year and the year before. They'll know they pulled this achievement out of a furnace of a game which raged with the intensity of summer. And they'll know they can do it again.

The best of it is they will look back at the course of the game and know that when things began going wrong for them they stuck to their six-shooters and pulled the game out of the fire.

It was a great day for Justin McCarthy, although he looked laconic and unemotional at the end of it.

Justin pulled his usual trick beforehand, playing 11 players in different positions from those in which they had been selected to play, but his genius yesterday was in knowing when to stick and when to fold. When he introduced Eoin McGrath and Paul Flynn they both pulled out points quickly at a time when Waterford were trailing badly.

His success, though, was in having the guts to stick with certain other players. John Mullane had a poor opening hour. His touch was treacherous and when he got the ball in his hand his electrified desire to do well led him to take the wrong option again and again. Any time McCarthy flashed up a substitute board we raised our eyebrows that it wasn't Mullane who was being yanked ashore.

Then in the 62nd minute things started going right for the lobster man. A point to bring the game back to 16 points apiece. And then three minutes later, after Richie Power had put Kilkenny back in the lead, a long free from the Waterford defence broke to Mullane. Bang. Level again. Stage set.

Ah, those final minutes will serve Waterford well. Kilkenny, in the manner of champions and warriors, wouldn't die. Another long free from the Waterford defence. Séamus Prendergast rising, catching, turning, bumping into a wall of black and amber, bouncing away and firing off his back foot to put Waterford one ahead. Wonderful.

But Henry Shefflin, with the game already into its four minutes of injury-time, knocked another free over to tie the scores.

We let a little groan out of us at the thought of a replay. Possibly so too did Waterford. They wouldn't countenance being asked to do this again in the near future.

And so Mullane, now omnipotent, pulled down a high ball and knocked it back to Eoin Kelly, who had the brass cojones to meet it without taking it in the hand and drive it between the Kilkenny posts from 60 yards.

There's a good argument to be had as to who is the greatest Eoin Kelly currently playing the game.

Kelly's point in an ideal world would have decided the game but there will be no regrets in Waterford that Prendergast added another to drive more than the minimum chink of light between the sides.

Waterford had finished as the stronger and more confident side. Not often you can say that about any team playing Kilkenny.

Early in the second half we had a bad feeling that Waterford were going to their demise. When a team are two points ahead at the break and smelling their first national title in decades it's alarming to see them concede the first five points of the second half. Against Kilkenny it's usually terminal as well.

Waterford have changed, though. We have the sort of vague impression when we think of Waterford that they are basically the same outfit that started out under Gerald McCarthy back in the 1990s and that by some miracle of resilience they have managed to keep the same old show on the road all this time.

We're wrong . Waterford know how to defend now. Declan Prendergast was wonderful yesterday. His catching and physical presence were extraordinary, and for a big man, the couple of times he had to turn on a ball played in behind him he did superbly. Eoin Murphy has of course matured into a splendid defender, and it looks on yesterday's evidence as if Aidan Kearney will be there for years to come. He made one intervention on Aidan Fogarty in the first half yesterday which was an essay in bravery and timing.

A bonus is the form of Clinton Hennessy in goal. There have been many summers when Waterford goalkeepers have been instrumental in breaking the hearts of their county folk. Yesterday Hennessy was serene throughout, doing the routine stuff with the sang-froid of a secret agent and conjuring up one great moment in each half.

In the first, with Shefflin bursting through, Hennessy made a magnificent foray to dispossess him. In the second, with Shefflin looking for Eddie Brennan, he came and made a brave interception. Two goals averted. Sublime.

Waterford are set nicely now. Two weeks back with their clubs then a week of warm-weather training in Portugal. Their supporters have just completed a draw whereby 100 tickets were sold for 1,000 each. First prize was a racehorse for a year, second prize was a trip for 10 to the Prix de l'Arc. Maybe by September a couple of All-Ireland tickets would be more coveted than either.

It's still spring but Waterford have done one thing already: they have banished the gloom which attended all previews of what looked like being a grey hurling summer drained of all romance.

The league is done. Let's dance.