What pride means

I think it might be possible that – very gradually – things might conceivably perhaps be inching towards starting to return to something approaching a state vaguely resembling near-normality.

Maybe.

I feel that there might be some hope of starting to tell some kind of story, and even aspiring to weave two or three stories together. A little. A little hope. Four stories, even. Or ten. A hundred. A thousand. Sixty-five thousand individual stories, all woven together into the greatest tale of hope and belief and struggle and faith and honesty and strength ever told in the history of sport.

Where are the superlatives? Too late: they've all been used.

What hyperbole would be enough? None. There is no describing what took place.

Who was there? We were all there: the ones who sailed and those who flew, those who walked and those who crawled. Some stood and saluted in Cardiff, and I'm proud to say I was one of them, as was the Bullet. But equally proud are those who held firm back home : the ones who became the well-spring of strength when it was needed. They were there too, as if they stood on that very field, and who could deny that from far away they reached out and lifted their men to victory?

Cardiff, Limerick, Cork, Dublin, Letterkenny, Inis Mor, Kyoto or Cairo: wherever you want. We were all there.

We're still there, and it will be a long, long time before we're moved.