John Mullane holds three hurls bound together. His face is a deep red and hanging over the neck of a navy sweatshirt is a gold crucifix. John has scored three goals in the Munster final and now he wants to disappear. Hurling. It is strange how the game breaks.

"I suppose back in January, I was going through hell," he says quietly when asked for his thoughts. "Hurling wasn't on the agenda at all and I never dreamed I would be playing in a Munster final. So it's good to be back and playing at the highest level."

When the GAA world was slumbering at the turn of the year, Mullane was summoned to Croke Park to make his plea over an incident in a club challenge game he played with De La Salle.

Whatever happened, an opponent was left seriously hurt. The disciplinary board gave Mullane 12 weeks to consider his part in it, and for a long time, the Waterford forward could but relive those mad seconds. He wondered if hurling still had a place in his soul and if he had a place in the game. Here, he found his answer.

With the litter sweeping across the terraces of Semple Stadium, the pressmen rifled through almanacs trying to identify the last man to nail three goals in Munster's most ancient theatre. Nothing of that nature had happened, it was discovered, for quite a long time.

"Well, being out of the game for those three months, I felt I was a bit rusty against Limerick, that I wasn't on my game, and I wanted to prove what I am capable of. And it just happened today. Other days, it don't happen. They just all fell my way today and I seemed to put them away."

The only goal that would beat Mullane's first for the score of the game was Mullane's third. A looping, loitering ball sent in from Eoin McGrath, a gang of red jerseys gathering to meet it, Mullane on the fringes, lithe and wired and intense.

Somehow the ball presented itself and the forward just vanished from the company. Fifteen minutes left in a Munster final, haring towards the bank of red shirts on the town terrace and firing a shot that stunned the entire stadium.

All day long Mullane was Cork's tormentor-in-chief. All afternoon, he was charged. He felt, after all, as if he owed quite a few people.

"People in Waterford really rallied around me in those 12 weeks and got me back on the rails at a time when life was hell on and off the field."

At half-time, he sat in the dressing-room and listened hard as a concerted wave of Cork pressure was anticipated. It duly came and he found himself marvelling at the force of it: (John) Gardiner's long-range frees, Ben O'Connor's impetuosity, Tom Kenny's iron will. It was like being hit with a water hose.

"Cork being Cork, they will always stay with you," he shrugs.

"That's the kind of them . . . it boils down to hunger. And whatever Donal O'Grady is giving them at the moment, well, there was flames in their stomachs and we had no answer to it."

But he alone had. With the scores drying up for Waterford, Mullane responded. He was alive to Paul Flynn's presence of mind with a short free when the whole country waited for a tap across the bar. With the ball in his hand, he eyed an exposed corner of the net and rifled his second goal.

"It was a gift from Paul," he says." And then for the third, it just fell for me. But I came here looking for two Munster medals in a row and I would rather give back a performance and have a win there today, you know."

And then he takes his leave, ghosting through the big blue door that leads out the back of the Old Stand. Three goals and no medal.

It was, in the end, a strange sort of homecoming but one that will stay with him long after the disappointment of losing has faded.