Brendan Leahy came whirl winding into the classroom looking for the proceeds from a sponsored walk we'd all trudged through some weeks previously. When it came my turn to cough up either the cash or an excuse, I offered nothing but the sort of remark which passes for drollery when you are 15 (or an adult sports columnist).

Ten seconds later, outside the classroom door with Brendan Leahy, he said something which I think of every time I get a letter from a reader.

"Nobody likes a smartass, Mr Humphries. Nobody likes a smartass."

I don't know when delinquency of the mouth became such a problem that I ended up with no option but to become a professional smartass, but when I called into the local soccer pitch in Mullingar yesterday and watched Brendan Leahy coaching another team in another All-Ireland final, I saw that perhaps there had been a wrong turning somewhere.

Brendan Leahy was coaching football and hurling teams when I went into secondary school in St Joseph's, Fairview. That was 23 years ago, a time when we thought flares were cool and Kerrymen like Brendan Leahy were comical. Now, driving home from work in the evenings, I see him still, trousers tucked into football socks, ball under his arm with some team or other trailing after him, their studs zinging on the metal footbridge which traverses the busy main road in Fairview.

The world has changed. Twenty-three years ago, when he was shoehorning us into his car for away games, the school would have given its pupils firearms sooner than it would have given them soccer coaching. Yet, by the time we left it behind, the school had gained some proficiency in soccer, and now with a couple of All-Ireland appearances to its credit this decade, St Joseph's Fairview, which for decades produced the Dublin footballers who mattered, is more of a soccer school than a Gaelic school, and the ties with St Vincent's GAA club, which once seemed umbilical, are all but withered.

Brendan Leahy told me a few years ago that when the school team plays on a Sunday these days he has to notify the local junior soccer clubs. Yet he perseveres happily. He has a GAA heart but a sportsman's soul, and if the kids want soccer, he'll coach soccer and coach it well.

He rang my desk last week, and by reflex I blurted out that the dog had eaten my homework. He was alarmed by the news which came to him from yesterday's opposition that not one Dublin paper had been inquiring about yesterday's game. Indeed, not one hint had come in from the FAI that the Schools final was even taking place.

You think of Brendan Leahy and you think of those victims of the darker side of the Charlton era - Brian Kerr and Noel O'Reilly and Liam Tuohy, men who were asked to pack their bags when the rest of us were putting on our rah-rah skirts. You think of them and you wonder if we have our priorities right on sport at all.

We spend our lives writing about and cheering for the visible part of the iceberg without a thought for what is underneath. Whatever happened to looking after the points, knowing that the goals will take care of themselves?

It is a commonplace these days to say that the streams of young players now being channelled by Brian Kerr are the children of the Charlton era, the old curmudgeon's legacy to us all. Indeed, it is startling to think that the team which came home to be garlanded at Dublin Airport on Saturday were six-year-olds when Ireland beat England in Stuttgart. Yet we might pause to consider how much easier Mick McCarthy's job would be if instead of inheriting a team which was uniformly on the depressing side of 30 he had inherited the first wave of children from the Charlton era.

The tragedy is that all those kids who came through teams run by men like Brendan Leahy and others in the decade of Big Jack never got the attention that Kerr gives now. The Charlton/Setters era was all about the tip of the iceberg, the business of hard professionals and player pools and endorsement deals and big tournaments.

We didn't complain at the time, but so many of those kids who daydreamed during the Charlton era ran into cul de sacs of indifference at official level. We throw up our arms now and ask how could Keith O'Neill have been ignored by Maurice Setters? How could any of us have ignored the neglect of the underage game?

The odds are that not many of the kids who triumphed in Scotland will play senior level for Ireland. The odds are longer again on any of those who played for Joey's and Summerhill yesterday making it. Perhaps a handful of the Under-18 team who play at Tolka this week will break through.

But their achievements are an end in themselves, a spur for other kids and coaches, an investment in the future, a precursor of one of the great byproducts of sport, daydreaming.

Perhaps we are approaching a time when we will reassess the State commitment to elite sports people and replace it with a more intensive nurturing of the notion of sport for all. How many times in this country have we fretted out loud about the price of Manchester United replica jerseys without being bothered that most kids never break sweat in those or any other jerseys?

It isn't just about soccer and ball games for boys. Jim McDaid's proposal that grant-aided athletes have their cash linked to regular blood tests is welcome; we need to know that people who take our grants and wave our flags are clean role models. But we need more than honesty from them as well. We need the sort of commitment that they give to commercial sponsors. A few advertisements, a few coaching visits to schools every year. Act like heroes, for goodness sake: give interviews, be visible, be positive.

We should expect more from those who have made it through the system in terms of what they put back in. We will have the right to demand that when we have the system in order, when we cease viewing State aid for the infrastructure of sport as some kind of vote-buying profligacy and see it as investment which has positive ramifications for health, education, crime and photo opportunities with Irish winners in the next century.

Brendan Leahy and Brian Kerr and countless others across the range of codes are the true heroes of Irish sport. The support given to Brian Kerr and his teams by the FAI is commendable, yet when this office rang the FAI last week nobody there was even certain if the Schools Cup final was on yesterday.

The chances are that we will fill Tolka Park this week for an Under-18 game. Exciting times. And lessons for all of us. Even those of us in the smartass community.