Coleman was the kind of awkward old curmudgeon they make movies about. Set in his ways and uproariously unapologetic for them. You'd ring him up and ask him for a couple of minutes of his time and the first thing he'd do would be to wonder aloud if there might be a few pound in it for him. "I'll talk to you no problem, boy, " he said the first time I asked him for an interview around five years ago. "Just you bring a big cheque with you."

Granted, it was unnerving the first time but you soon came to realise he never meant it. All he was doing was looking for a bit of mischief. I last interviewed him before the start of the 2006 championship in a pub in Ashbourne, Co Meath. "No problem, boy, " he'd said. "The Tribune'll buy me a good steak dinner, will they?" After an hour-and-a-half of talking about cancer and football, he called for the bill and paid it.

Made a big show of it, mind.

There are a million Eamonn Coleman stories to be told but I've always liked the one of how he became manager of Longford the best. Some time over the winter of 1995, Longford's county secretary John Greene was laid up in Mullingar hospital for a fortnight or so. The county's footballers were without a manager at the time and there wasn't a whole lot of jostling in the queue of people looking to have a go at it. Indeed, there wasn't really a queue to speak of. As it turned out, Greene found the answer looking out the window of the ward he was in because there, laying blocks and covered in building site dirt, was Coleman.

When he was the trainer with Cavan, Martin McElkennon once said that part of the secret of how Coleman got so much from his players was that very fact. He was up before the sun every morning through the winter and out in the cold doing proper man's work. "You look at inter-county managers: they're teachers, businessmen, the odd one might be a cop. All boys like me, sitting in a chair. Coleman, boy, is out there every weekday on the sites. Yet he'll stand up on Sunday in our team hotel and talk better than any manager in Ireland."

Players adored him. Whatever happened, they were never in any doubt that he was their man. He sat with them down the back of the team bus and played cards and made jokes about the county board crowd up the front. If Tony Scullion didn't want to do his stretches like everybody else because, in Scullion's words, "there was no such thing as hamstrings 40 years ago, boys", Coleman would just laugh and walk on.

Because however much adoration they had for him, he revisited on them many times over. The Derry team he won the All Ireland with was his touchstone always. When we spoke that time in Ashbourne, he started giving out about blanket defences, railing that they were only a ploy to give bad defenders somewhere to hide. "If you had Scullion and Kieran McKeever there, you'd have no call to be bringing men back, " he said.

Even though he left Derry many times, it never left him.

He hated having to go back and manage Cavan against them in the championship and never let the county board forget that he couldn't forgive them for the shafting he got in the summer of 1994.

It seemed like a crazy, petty move back then and looks even worse now because few are in any doubt that it cost the county at least one more All Ireland. And there's no question that it cut Coleman to the bone. "To be honest with you, I don't think I ever really got over that, " he said last year. "There's a hurt there that never really went away."

In a neat and tidy world, Coleman would have been left in charge of Derry for a decade, would have picked up another couple of All Irelands and would have retired a 24-carat legend of the game.

But although he'd have loved nothing more than that, somehow it wouldn't really have suited him. Better that he's remembered as more of a folk hero, a snowflakeunique cult figure who brought fun to a business that's been growing more and more serious by the year.

Sleep well, Eamonn. The world feels a little greyer without you.