THAT hug. It was in a little room, a sweaty, white-walled little room deep down below the stands of the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. The Heineken Cup final had ended about three-quarters of an hour previously and into this little room came Declan Kidney, Peter Stringer and Anthony Foley, the trophy dangling by the handle from the Munster captain's left hand. They were spent, dead-eyed almost. Foley, haggard and mucky, shuffling along in his socks, looked a broken man. Just for a moment, tiredness had won the toss and had gone in to bat ahead of joy. The silence that greeted them lasted until a shout came from maybe the only man in the room worthy of breaking it. The Radio Kerry co-commentator.

"Go on, Foley, " roared Mick Galwey. Foley looked up and his face cracked. "Go on, Gaillimh, " he roared back and beckoned his old captain forward to the top table. "He called me up there and we had a bit of a hug, " Galwey would later say in Munster: Our Road To Glory. "I knew what it meant to Anthony Foley, Anthony Foley knew what it meant to me."

It was the sweetest moment of the year. You could write a book on what that hug contained. What it meant and where it came from. The men it was between and the men it was for. The days and nights and weeks and months and years that were in it. The hurt it made up for as well as the hurt it didn't. The places they came from, the people they'd go home to. The nights spent plotting, the sessions spent fighting, the journeys spent laughing, the seasons spent in pain. It was all there in that hug.

All of sport was. Between Foley and Galwey, everything under the sporting sun has been experienced. The glory, the good times, the honesty, the effort, all there side-by-side with the defeats, the misery, the bad times, the losers. They've seen every side of sport from the camaraderie of the give-it-a-lash days to the modern perfectionism. They've come across cheats and liars who wanted to hurt them, seen teammates bitten and gouged and kicked and punched, seen another face and face down the possibility of a career-ending doping charge, another still face and face down an opportunistic allegation of racist taunting. There have been deaths to deal with, lives to live. There has been luck and judgement, good and bad. Skill to make their eyes pop and incompetence to make their heart sink. All of sport, and it was all there in that hug.

So if you'll forgive a little sentimentality, it only seems right to make that hug the diving board from which we plunge into the year just gone. Munster's achievement so towers over 2006 anyway that it would be silly to start elsewhere. From the incredible mood-changing 46-9 win in Castres a fortnight after the New Year's Eve defeat by Leinster right the way along to standing in the Limerick rain with Marty Morrissey in May, they never gave us a moment's peace. Instead, they gave us the drama of David Wallace's injury-time try against Sale, of Ronan O'Gara's gloriously chippy performance against Leinster, of Peter Stringer's dart-in-a-million against Biarritz.

And they gave us Paul O'Connell.

No more heroes anymore? Wrong.

So wrong. He steps on the field and you almost think the opposition should be given a blindfold and a last cigarette. The tackle on Sebastian Chabal. The try against Perpignan. Those eyes as he sat on the bench in the dying moments of the final, looking for all the world as if he was using them to control the action on the field like one of the baddies in Superman II. To steal an old Jim Murray line, when you come face to face with Paul O'Connell, you only hope it don't bite.

But if there was one moment from the year you'd like to wrap up in a box and tie a little bow on, one to take away for safe keeping and bring out whenever you were down and despairing about sport and sportspeople, it would actually be an off-pitch one. His interview with Tracy Piggott after Munster had beaten Leinster.

That Sunday in April was the domestic game here in apogee, the perfect fixture at the perfect time, the tin lid on an era of undreamtof popularity for the sport. Later that afternoon, Kerry and Galway played the National Football League final in Limerick in front of 7,598 people. They may as well have been streaking during the moon landings for all the notice anyone took. Leinster v Munster was one of those Italia 90 moments in Irish sport, the kind that turn your granny into an expert on the value of John Hayes as a lifter in the line-out.

They met on seemingly equal terms but as it turned out, Munster were way more equal than Leinster. Thirty points to six more equal.

Cliches got rack-stretched and tortured.

Culchie beat HiCo, mug of scald smashed glass of latte. And just as the country seemed set to spin off out into the Atlantic in a swirl of giddy gaiety, O'Connell found the words to haul the needle back out of the red zone.

"There are guys there on the Leinster team who I would have died for a couple of months ago and they would have done the same for me, " he said with enough thought and feeling to make the country stop and think about what they'd overdone. "It's a great win for us and I can understand their predicament. It's going to be a tough couple of weeks for them. I don't think you saw many of us jump around the place at the end. It wouldn't be right."

With the likes of O'Connell around, it's little wonder that when it comes to scanning through the end of term reports, rugby's is the one with the most gold stars. Munster won the Heineken Cup, Ulster the Celtic League.

For Ireland, the year began with a second Triple Crown in three seasons and ended with Eddie O'Sullivan presiding over what is by common consent . . . albeit not officially . . . the second best international side in the world.

All bar New Zealand and France were beaten in the course of the year but they gave a bigger scare than most to the former and only just ran out of road against the latter in Paris.

The November internationals did a rare thing for an Irish team in international sport.

They confirmed that for once, they are as good as they think they are (and, in turn, as good as the public had hoped they were).

Old heads will preach caution and worry that we're all being set up for a Six Nations/World Cup fall. And maybe we are.

Here's a thought, though. When the biggest complaint about a squad is neither a lack of players nor a muddled gameplan but rather the fact that it's short of cover in the event of injuries in very specific areas, are we possibly trying a little too hard to find company in misery?

When Shane Horgan stretched and strained for the line deep into injury-time at Twickenham that Saturday in March, it capped as fine a week as Irish sport could claim all year. The previous afternoon, on a glorious saucer of green 95 miles to the west, a Cheltenham festival of unprecedented Irish success came to a close. For the first time ever, the number of Irish-trained winners ran into double figures. Of the 24 races over four days, 20 were won by Irish jockeys. There was a clean sweep of the three main championship races for the second year in a row (with three different winners to last year), including the first two home in the Champion Chase, the first three in the Gold Cup and the first four in the Champion Hurdle.

Tony McCoy won his 8,768th jockeys' championship in Britain and only just missed out by a neck to Ruby Walsh in the battle for top jockey honours at Cheltenham. At home, Walsh finished top of the tree again despite enduring three months out with various injuries and spending half his available weeks riding for Paul Nicholls. Three weeks after Cheltenham, Slippers Madden rode Martin Brassil's Numbersixvalverde to victory in the Grand National, the fifth Irish winner of the race in the past eight years. Willie Mullins's Hedgehunter was second, just as he'd been in a heroic Gold Cup run 22 days beforehand. On and on and on until almost every major chasing and hurdling prize on either side of the Irish Sea washed up on this shore.

A month of shop-talking might not explain it all. It's about the boom and the money, certainly. The money to keep the horses here, to let a man who might otherwise have been a farmer try his hand at being a trainer, to let a group of lads who might otherwise have been no more than drinking buddies throw in a few grand apiece for the sake of a dream and a chanced arm.

But it's more viscerally about all heaven finally breaking loose for the people who've been involved in the sport their whole lives.

A remarkable aspect of the success is how democratic it's been. Those 10 winners at Cheltenham came from 10 different trainers.

Michael O'Brien, Ray Hurley, Philip Rothwell, Joe Crowley, Tony Martin . . . they all got a onerace slice of the pie the same as champion trainer Noel Meade did.

The outsized lottery finger came from the clouds and picked Colm Murphy, JJ Murphy and Mouse Morris out for the biggest prizes that week, and although the hefty prizes made life easier, we're still talking about small yards where every receipt must be pored over. The money has arrived but it hasn't been Abramovich money and it hasn't been lavished on any one head. The wealth has been spread and the innate expertise of racing people has spread it further again.

Long may it go on.

On the flat, we saw the emergence of Declan McDonagh as a rider of real class as well as an Epsom Derby favourite to shorten Jim Bolger's winter in Teofilo. But like a lot of years, one man loomed largest. It was another Kieren Fallon year but then again, a Kieren Fallon year like no other.

A spring that brought wins in the 2,000 Guineas and Epsom Oaks with George Washington and Alexandrova morphed into a summer severed by the British Horseracing Board's decision to strip him of his licence pending the outcome of his conspiracy to defraud trial. Then came winter and a sixmonth worldwide ban for cocaine use. And yet just when some thought that would be the end of him, he emerged the week before Christmas and spoke of wanting to repay Coolmore's faith and to keep riding for them for another five years.

If nothing else, the bare figures illuminate each side's keenness to continue. Aidan O'Brien trained 13 Group One winners during the year and Fallon rode 10 of them, despite riding his last race in Britain on 27 June. Mick Kinane and Seamie Heffernan filled in ably but it was hard not to wonder how things might have panned out had Fallon been whispering in George Washington's ear at Goodwood in August or at Churchill Downs in November.

How it will all resolve itself will be one of the stories of 2007. At the moment, the trial is set for September, although there is the possibility of an attempt by Fallon's legal team to get the case thrown out in January. As ever, he'll be nothing short of compelling viewing.

Which brings us neatly, as any end of year review inevitably must, to Roy Keane. Over the next week, you will almost certainly come across in one newspaper or other a spoof look ahead to 2007. You know the kind of thing, Ian Paisley to preside over the civil union of Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, scientists to find evidence of Michael McDowell's humanity and so forth. Was there even one so outlandish last January as to suggest that by year's end, we would have Keane under Niall Quinn, managing in the Championship, in charge of Mick McCarthy's old club and sharing with him a handshake and the wryest of smiles after nicking a 1-1 draw against his new one? Boy, does the world turn in entertaining loops sometimes.

Following Keane this year took us to Cumbernauld and Glasgow, to Sunderland and Derby, there to hang off his words or, if they didn't come, live off his actions. His stint at Celtic began in ignominy and ended in injury, his time so far at the Stadium of Light has been productive and encouraging. There was a while there in the summer when we allowed ourselves the brief thought that maybe he'd keep the head down for a while, let us all get on with our lives. But no, we are rapt once more. Our fault. And his too.

In truth, there's been little or nothing to see at home. In the Eircom League, there is only sadness. We could talk of Pat Fenlon's quiet excellence, of Paris Saint-Germain at the Brandywell, of a paper-thin close title race for the second year in a row. Or we could talk of how the best team in the country for the last five years couldn't afford to pay its players, of another season with too much time spent with the legal folk, of how a fan of one club threatened to self-immolate in protest at being left out of the newly-designed top flight next year. But bored and disillusioned with it all, we'll do neither. We'll move on.

But to where? To dear old Stan and the boys? Nothing to see here either, sadly. The downward spiral has been inexorable since the 2002 World Cup but nobody expected it to find its way to this sorry state. A new and barely credible low was achieved in the 5-2 defeat in Nicosia in October. Those who thought Steve Staunton was the right man for the job when John Delaney allakhazamed him into a football manager were in the minority but most were willing to give him a chance. He used it to be thrashed by Cyprus.

There's nothing more to say.

There really isn't. If there was even solace to be taken in the thought that things can't possibly get worse then that would at least be something but nobody can say that with any certainty. There's the prospect of them playing in Croke Park in a few months but even that happy day has become mired in recrimination with the GAA president publicly rebuking the FAI for grumbling about not being allowed into the place to train on their preferred date. For a sport so widely played, so widely watched, so widely talked about and read about and pored over and cherished, soccer at the highest level in this country stopped being fun some time ago. Shame.

Sad to say, but long stretches of the Gaelic games season left us cold, too. A year that started with a dreary brawl in Omagh ended with another in Croke Park. As a result of the Croke Park one, we Irish took our ball and told the Aussies we'd be staying at home next year as punishment. As a result of the one in Healy Park, we Irish found a way for nobody to bear the brunt of any punishment. Go figure. Both championships had their narratives and we followed both agog as ever but the salad days were few. Dublin v Mayo stood apart in the football, Cork v Waterford in the hurling. In the end, Kerry and Kilkenny stayed standing longest and nobody argued with the bona fides of either side.

We were left with personalities to sustain us. We spent the first half of the season wondering if we'd ever come across a hurler from the same realm as Eoin Kelly before spending the second half remembering we already had one in Henry Shefflin. Kerry sent us this impossibly likeable galoot called Kieran Donaghy to stand on the edge of the square, a redcheeked cherry picker who's here for both a good time and a long time. He saw more traffic than the Red Cow roundabout and yet smiled through it all. Pickings were otherwise slim, though.

We looked to individual sports for excellence and found it on the track and in the ring and on the course. Derval O'Rourke took a discipline in which Ireland has no tradition, won a world indoor title and a silver in the Europeans and suddenly made athletics watchable once more. She's been a thing of wonder this year, a doughty inspiration to those who despaired of ever being able to rejoice in a clean athlete again.

In boxing, Katie Taylor became world amateur champion in November in India (not to mention holding down a midfield general role in the women's senior international soccer team). Bernard Dunne filled the Point with punters and the sport here with the hope that maybe there's a superstar in our midst. And over in New York, John Duddy finished the year rated number eight in the WBO's middleweight rankings and number 10 with the WBA.

But it was golf that provided the year's biggest spectacle. In the week that led into the Ryder Cup in September, it was hard to shake the feeling that it had come to visit Ireland maybe half a decade too late. So tiresome had the crabbing become over the cost of it all, the size of it all, the flags, Wags and security tags of it all that you began to wonder if we'd long since given up on what Nell McCafferty referred to during Italia 90 as "the chance to be innocently happy".

But then Darren Clarke somehow nailed the best drive of the first morning, hit his second to 20 feet and rolled his putt dead centre and we were off. To be in the K Club that Friday morning was to remember why, for all the giving out about it as a contrived competition (as opposed to what, exactly? ), the Ryder Cup still grabs the throat of the back end of every second season. It'll be a lifetime until we see it here again . . . if we ever do . . . but that's okay.

By then, Padraig Harrington will have long finished up and let us in on just how good he turned out to be. With due respect to Derval and Katie and Slippers and AP and Rog and Paulie and the rest, Harrington's European Order of Merit win will have to go down as the achievement of the year. The luck was with him at the death in Valderrama but fortune only fills in the odd blank left behind when talent and work and genius are done for the day.

He knows he left a US Open behind him in June and it is a feeling that will linger and sustain him.

He ends the year as the eighth-ranked golfer in the world. Jessica Kuerten reached the number two spot in showjumping. Ken Doherty begins the year as provisionally the number two-ranked snooker player. The men's lightweight four of Paul Griffin, Eugene Coakley, Richard Archibald and Gearoid Towey won the World Cup series in Lucerne but were devastated at only bringing bronze home from the World Championships in Eton. In the search for inspiration, we don't have all that many miles to cover.

Unlike Richard Donovan who broke the Antarctic ultra-marathon record by a staggering three hours a fortnight ago when he ran 100k . . . in the An-frigging-tarctic if you don't mind . . . in 12 hours, 55 minutes, roughly the time most commuters spend in their car each day. Or Limerickman Paul Gleeson, who along with his Canadian girlfriend Tori Holmes, suddenly upped and decided to row the Atlantic despite neither ever having picked up an oar in their life. Or Mark Pollock, the frankly crazed Belfast man who keeps finding more limits to which he can push his body and this year took part in two Ironman competitions, one in Switzerland (marathon, 2.4k swim, 112-mile bike race) and one in New Zealand (140k bike race in three stages, 36k run, 33k of it up a bloody mountain known as the Southern Alps, 67k kayak down the Waimakariri river). To be fair, the man we should feel sorry for is Brendan Smyth, Pollock's compadre who accompanies the lunatic everywhere because he is blind.

So no, for once, everything isn't down and dreary and dispiriting. Life is where you want to find it in sport and never more so than at this time of year when every team is going to make a run at the championship and every golfer is going to fix his putting and every jockey is about to sit up on Pegasus. The year to come promises the return of Ger Loughnane and John O'Mahony and maybe even a fully fit Tyrone, soccer and rugby in Croke Park, another Cheltenham, another batch of majors for Ireland's greatest ever golfer to aim for, a world championships for Ms O'Rourke, hopefully a world title fight for either Mr Dunne or Mr Duddy, maybe even another Heineken Cup for Munster or at the very least another epic tilt at it.

And in September and (hopefully) October, we'll turn our eyes to France and see how far the rugby team can go in the World Cup. There'll be enough said about it between now and then to do us, so there's no point getting into a tizzy at this remove. But it's going to be there, hanging over the whole year, tempting us with thoughts of maybe seeing something special.

Of maybe seeing something like that hug.

And on freezing cold days like this, when there's hardly even enough daylight to squeeze in a run or nine holes or a puckabout in the back field, that possibility is enough to be getting on with.