A 13-match winning streak had just been shattered. The three-in-a-row bid was dead.

Immortality had crooked her finger, then given Cork a Harvey Smith. Now here was the losing manager dragged out of the funeral parlour and required to produce polite, meaningless words for the ears of the nation.

Instead he produced polite, meaningful words. Warm, sincere, gracious, heartfelt.

Where other losing managers would have gone through the motions and dished out the usual perfunctory cliches, Allen paid handsome tribute to the winners, freely identified the difference between the sides (Kilkenny's superior hunger) and praised his own team for their dedication. The tone of his voice was the mark of the man.

Among his numerous fine moments over the past two summers, this was arguably Allen's finest. Precisely because it occurred not in the flush of victory but amid the tremors of that forgotten phenomenon, defeat.

And fine moments there were in abundance. The first half of last year's provincial decider, when Tipp were overwhelmed by the blitzkrieg of speed, movement and remorselessness from Cork's shock troops.

The champions lengthening their stride to meet the rising ground in the closing furlong of the All Ireland semi-final against Clare. This season's Munster semi-final against the same opposition, perhaps the most complete Cork performance of the past four years. All in all, not bad going for the former masseur in the Leeside boot room.

"I certainly took the job at the only time it would ever be offered to me, " Allen conceded on these pages back in May. "I mean, I have no pedigree as a senior team manager or inter-county coach."

No, but he had decency, humanity and integrity. The ideological battle having long been fought and won, the crusade being captained by Donal Og Cusack, Allen merely had to be the consensus politician that he was. He was a facilitator rather than an instigator, a chairman of the board rather than a managing director, an avuncular staff sergeant to Donal O'Grady's martinet. Right man, right place, right time.

He also had the good sense to recognise and appreciate what worked. Where a less secure man might have sought to make his imprint by trying to fix what wasn't broken, Allen had the good sense to leave well enough alone.

"Creating the conditions" was his operative phrase. Steady as she goes.

Errors of judgment? Strikingly few. His remark in the immediate aftermath of this year's Clare match about nobody beating Cork only themselves was, if unwise, an honest reaction to an excellent performance. Although certainly Pat Mulcahy should have been whisked away from Aidan Fogarty's neighbourhood a good deal quicker than he was three weeks ago, that was about the height of it. It was Allen who formulated the long-ball strategy that floored Galway in last year's final. It was he who made the call to take off Ronan Curran and Brian Corcoran in the semi-final.

Would that every manager showed the same grasp of plain common sense that Allen demonstrated the same afternoon. We'll give him the floor again. "There came a stage that day where I said okay, whatever else happens . . . and had we lost, I'd have been the one hung out rather than the selectors . . . we're going to make a couple of moves. We had no option. It was a case of move then or throw in the towel. People made a lot of it afterwards, how well the changes had worked, but we were at the brink and that was it."

Ultimately, Cork won as many All Irelands under Allen and O'Grady as their forward line entitled them to.

With 11 players appearing in all 17 of the their championship outings in the past three years and three more players appearing in 16 of them, their very strength eventually became their undoing. They made, because they had to, a virtue of their consistency of selection. In the end stability, because it always would, gave way to stasis.

Kilkenny took the field on 3 September with five new faces from the 2004 All Ireland final, six if you count Cha Fitzpatrick's second coming as a midfielder; Cork could have done with four.

That the defending champions had ceased evolving was nobody's fault, least of Allen's, but simply a function of a splutter in the county's supply line.

It was to the enormous credit of the management that their successive shuffles of the same hand kept taking the tricks.

In much the same way that Jimmy Barry-Murphy, another Barrs man, happily went back to his greyhounds, John Allen will return with pleasure to his music (make sure you treat yourself to The Seeger Sessions, John), his books and his travel. Intercounty hurling will be a colder station without him.