Watching at home in Banagher, Damien Martin, the first All Star goalkeeper, was suitably impressed. "An amazing display, " he says.

"Now and again a goalie will make one or two spectacular saves in a match, but to make so many in the one game was incredible. Cummins' reflexes were unreal.

He got his angles perfect for the third save from Richie Power and he probably hasn't been given the credit he deserved for the penalties . . .

because he was a metre or two off his line, he was saving them from very close range."

An interesting observation, even if Power's first penalty was directed straight at the Ballybacon/Grange man and the second, again delivered without a potentially complicating bounce, was hit a comfortable height and would surely have been blocked by Paul Curran, crouched to Cummins' right on the goalline, had the sliotar continued on its course. It was then that things began to get harder and that Cummins moved from bread and butter stuff to nouvelle cuisine.

A 24th-minute one-on-one save from Richie Power that was good rather than great, according to Donal 'Eamon Dunphy' O'Grady, who asserted that the wing-forward should have directed it up in aice le Cummins' ceann instead of going low and across the goalie's body. A sharp response to Eoin Reid's 28th-minute ground stroke that was arguably the pick of the saves, so smartly did Cummins get down to deflect the sliotar away. And more one-on-one heroics in the 31st minute, this time against Cha Fitzpatrick, that prompted the TG4 commentary to invoke God and the Blessed Virgin.

To hold that there are one or two Kilkennymen not on Brian Cody's panel at the moment who would have stitched the last two chances . . . by opting to shoot across him, Power and Fitzpatrick gave the goalie a micro-second extra to react . . . is irrelevant; Cummins, who'll tell you that the saves were all different in their own way, could only stop the shots hit at him, not the shots that might have been hit at him.

Didn't the Dutch put up a statue to the little boy who kept his finger in the dyke?

The parallel with the 2003 All Ireland semi-final was, of course, glaring. Within 20 seconds of the restart at Croke Park that afternoon, Cummins had saved shots from Eddie Brennan and DJ Carey.

A few minutes later he sprinted out from goal to beat John Hoyne to the ball. Shortly afterwards, a Kilkenny 65 was awarded following an angled Carey shot that may or may not have crossed the endline before Cummins, making assurance doubly sure, got a stick to it at his near post.

Next minute he was saving a low, bouncing shot from the rampant Brennan on the 13.

Lear defied the black and amber storm for nine . . . it seemed like 19 . . . minutes of the second half before he was beaten by a head-high musket blast from Brennan, who'd clearly concluded that going low was pointless with this one-man roadblock barring the way. Although the Shootout at the Cummins Corral famously followed, few people now remember that the Tipperary goalie denied Henry Shefflin at point-blank range two minutes after Tommy Walsh's goal. That marked his seventh save of the half on top of the carrying-out of his routine duties.

A better display than seven days ago in Thurles? Difficult to call, but the Tribune suggests last Sunday's, on the basis that Cummins didn't leave any crumbs for marauding forwards to feast on.

Not that he's the only man we should be celebrating.

Think of Damien Fitzhenry, Davy Fitzgerald, Offaly's Brian Mullins: more gods of the spectacular than you can shake an ashplant at. So many games, so many saves, so few errors. That we even remember their mistakes, such as Davy Fitz's for Michael Duignan's goal in the 1995 All Ireland final, is a tribute in itself.

It is, Damien Martin agrees, a golden era for hurling goalkeepers. "Whereas Tony Reddin and Ollie Walsh probably overshadowed everybody else in their eras, I've never seen so many good goalies together at the one time. I mean, look at James McGarry. The epitome of soundness. He does a great job. Donal Og Cusack the same. But these days you don't have to beat just one man to get an All Star. You have to beat several of them."

Television replays will remind us of that forever.