Of all the linkages, the most important in confirming a friendship was the football field.

Sean Brady was . . . in football terms . . . a classic "safe pair of hands, " specifically in defensive duties, because he was a fullback. Dogged.

Stubborn. Stubborn in the sense of sticking to the task. He was reliable . . . and he had judgement.

This was not a man who could be easily fooled into "buying a dummy."

In football, where a player feints to the left but intends to go to the right, it's called "selling a dummy".

The new cardinal was never fooled.

Against all odds, our team won the College Championship in our fourth year, where we managed to beat a team of all-stars, mainly due to the efforts of Sean Brady, Donie O'Sullivan (who went on to win an all-Ireland medal with Kerry) and me, because I was a forward and the chief free kick taker.

Sport and Greek Tragedy.

Football and Greek History. The two themes ran together through his years in Maynooth until graduation in 1960. He had a deep love of Greek drama and history.

Sean Brady became our class senior, and his "immediate" . . . the individual assigned to be beside him for the duration of his time in Maynooth . . . was Dermot Clifford, currently archbishop of Cashel.

Two archbishops in one class isn't a bad score. An archbishop and a cardinal would suggest a bunch of glory boys.

Except that Sean Brady is the antithesis of a glory boy. For a big man, he has a remarkable capacity to fade into the background of a group. To listen. To trust in the possibility of a wise emerging consensus, rather than seek to steer a group towards a particular point.

It would be easy to characterise the new cardinal as conservative.

Just as his stubbornness is a strength, so too is his conservatism. He is wary of the merely fashionable or populist. He is not an emotionally needy man fuelled by the approval of others.

His faith is a solid, permanent, cherished and understated certainty that renders him immune to the pressure to come to fast decisions.

This man will bring all the elements of his past, his learning and his willingness to draw on the thinking of others to address every problem he faces, in all its elements.