Good sense prevailed in the end as a couple of his friends and some Kerry folk got him to cop on to himself but it's still hard to get the image out of your head. Sick of it all, he was. Sick of the year-after-year, of the hope that only existed for to be dashed in the end, of another final ending in a half-empty stadium of half-embarrassed winners. Sick, most of all, of how nobody from Kerry had gloated or gloried over him since the end of the game but instead had comforted him like he was standing in the family row at the front of a funeral mass.

Your heart went out to him, not that he'd have thanked you for your sympathy. But there was a small jealousy there too. For all his heartache, at least he got to see the summer out, at least he got to feel the thrum of the day of days. That never happens to most of us and, thanks to the practised fatalism we've studiously squirreled away over the years, most of us know it never will.

Which is why you can burn your jerseys all you like, Mayo people, but the rest of us won't stop hoping you finally come good sometime. Like it or not, as we head into the summer, ye're the neutrals' secondfavourite team. (Okay, so some Galway people might have a word to say about that but we can hardly expect them to be neutral where Mayo are concerned. ) And the same naturally goes for Waterford when the sliotars start flying in a couple of weeks.

There are no hard and fast rules as to how to become everyone's secondfavourite team but there are certain boxes to tick. First off, you have to be serial losers. And not just any old kind of serial losers but serial losers who first win gloriously, thereby creating hope that maybe this will be the year where it all works out. Any old shower could have got tanked by Kerry last September but we're drawn towards Mayo because of the unfeasibly riveting win over Dublin.

By the same token, it was easy to forgive Waterford's virtual non-appearance . . .

Paul Flynn apart . . . in the 2004 All Ireland semi-final against Kilkenny because of what had gone before it in that year's epic Munster final.

Which brings us on to the second and third boxes. You have to have been on the go for a while and, in that time, you have to have been involved in some bona fide barnburners.

Mayo, it hardly needs pointing out, have lost four All Ireland finals in 11 years but they've given value for money for much of the way. That game against Dublin was clearly the most rousing of them but there's rarely been more than a kick in it between them and Galway over the past decade and even the 2005 quarter-final defeat to Kerry was easy on the eye.

As for Waterford, they've been rattling around in the consciousness of the floating voter ever since the one-point defeat to Kilkenny in the 1998 semi-final, playing out gut-wrenchers against Tipp, Clare and especially Cork all the while.

That's a lot of credit built up along the road. Next up is a need for readily identifiable characters, in which both sides are, of course, abundant. From Ciaran Mac to Mortimer to the sadly absent for this year Ronan McGarrity. From Big Dan to Mullane to The Other Eoin Kelly. And Ken, majestic Ken, the last great gap-toothed matinee idol.

Players who like the bit of flourish, the bit of showing-off. Maybe other sides are right to work the ball in closer to goal before shooting but, when the year's done, it's McDonald's left-foot score at the end of the Dublin match you remember. Ditto Kelly in injury-time last Sunday. Magic stuff.

It should be pointed out, though, that this affection will almost certainly wither on the vine just as soon as either side climbs the steps of the Hogan Stand.

Ask the people of Tyrone or Armagh or Clare to compare how enthusiastically their breakthrough All Irelands were received at the time to the welcome they're generally afforded these days.

The air is definitely chillier up where the champions dwell.

So enjoy the goodwill while it lasts, lads. Just don't make it last too much longer.

For all our sakes.