It would appear safe to wax a little elegiac about Wexford's hurlers (safer than was the case with, say, Clare's a couple of weeks back) in the aftermath of Sunday's large defeat by Offaly. It was an appropriate way for the team to go, not because they were dignified by the 11-point margin but because the pairing of the counties has been a little cockpit of its own throughout the 1990s.

This was the sixth successive year in which Offaly had played Wexford. Three times in the previous five, the winners had gone on to win the All-Ireland and no-one would be stunned if Offaly had made it four times out of six by next September.

It has been a peculiar rivalry because the teams haven't changed that much in the course of six meetings. Twenty of those involved last Sunday featured in the first match in the sequence back on 17th July 1994. Despite that rough equivalence and the comparable average age, Wexford had a greater concentration of players in their 30s and have wilted first.

The mysteries of what motivates Offaly can be examined again this summer but the scale of what Wexford brought to hurling in this last decade of the century should be acknowledged.

There were two errors (as far as I know) in last week's column. One was that the crowd for the Leinster semi-final double bill would fall back from last year's figure and continue a trend of decline. The other was that the lack of a strong enough fourth county was the reason behind such a likelihood.

In the end, the crowd constituted a record for the Leinster semi-finals but the matches surely constituted a record for one-sidedness - between them were won by a massive 33 points.

The size of the crowd was up by a couple of hundred on the figure of 52,079 set in 1997 when Offaly-Wexford was again the main event on the semi-finals' double bill. Kilkenny and Wexford also rewrote the records for the Leinster final that year by attracting 55,492. The same year, Wexford and Tipperary set a record for the attendance at an All-Ireland hurling semi-final with a crowd of 62,142.

It's worth noting in that barrage of statistics that the records being broken were from the 1950s, Wexford's greatest era and popularly accounted the Golden Age of hurling. The county's two tilts with Cork in 1954 and '56 set records for All-Ireland hurling finals which will never be equalled. What makes the last few years extraordinary is that the trend has been for such figures to go down given the capacity restrictions made necessary by modern safety requirements.

Hurling is, of course, about more than setting attendance records. On that count, Wexford can hardly be faulted. With Offaly, they gave the decade its best Leinster final in 1996 and perhaps its best match, full stop. Three years earlier, their Leinster final against Kilkenny also gave them strong claims on the second-best Leinster final of the 1990s. In addition there was the three-part National League final in 1993, which was eventually lost to Cork.

Behind the dry statistics were some blazing afternoons. The '96 Leinster final represented the team's apogee. It can be forgotten, given that it was Eamonn Cregan's last match in charge of Offaly, that the then Leinster champions were in exceptional form and had just murdered Laois in the semi-final, playing some irresistible hurling.

They were overwhelming favourites, not to win well but to be just too good for what was acknowledged as an improving Wexford. On the day, Wexford came good. The players performed with just the right balance of individualism and team play. They observed the new imperatives of Liam Griffin's regime: no aimless blasting of the ball into the forwards, no witless soloing.

In the scorching heat of the afternoon, Wexford were unveiled. Tactically they were sharp and hard to nail down even for someone of Cregan's acumen. Liam Dunne stood at the fulcrum of it all, his arms spread wide to emphasise and encourage the new, expansive spread of their game. Pushing relentlessly down those wings, Wexford burned off the huge challenge of Offaly.

Larry Murphy took Brian Whelahan for five points and at the end with the match on the line, Martin Storey and Tom Dempsey - old-timers well versed in hard-luck stories - ascended through gears few thought the team possessed and rattled off between them a six-point salvo which brought Offaly tumbling down from their provincial throne.

Griffin's role wasn't just the tactical one although that was a pronounced influence on the All-Ireland success. Together with Rory Kinsella and Seamus Barron, he talked through every possibility the final might throw out. It was drummed into the players that there was a way around every obstacle.

"Say Liam Dunne gets the line after five minutes," Griffin demanded, "say Martin Storey gets the line after five minutes. Say Dunne and Storey bang into each other and are carted off after five minutes. What do we do? Do we give up?" In the end Eamonn Scallan was sent off after 34 minutes and they coped.

IT was Griffin who embodied the whole enterprise. He was the front-ofhouse man with the zeal of a preacher and the sure touch of a populist politician. Griffin made the players walk across the border to Wicklow the morning of the '96 Leinster final, telling them they would return with the Bob O'Keeffe Cup. Had things gone as usual, no-one could have shown their face in public for months.

He talked back the years and talked up his players and did it without bad-mouthing anyone. No county was as wound up for an All-Ireland. The atmosphere on the narrow, cobbled streets of Wexford town was electric the night before. There were plenty of people in the county who could remember winning All-Irelands and the sense of loss since the carnival ended in 1968. "Hunger," said Griffin, "we invented the stuff."

There was a soft landing after success. Griffin might have stepped down but Kinsella stepped up. Record crowds turned out. Super-sub Billy Byrne saluted the Hill after the goal against Kilkenny. Another Leinster title. The great emotion of last year and the appropriately doomed attempt to mark the 1798 bicentenary when Offaly's late theft of the match came within a week of commemorating the precise 200th anniversary of Vinegar Hill.

Back on September 2nd, 1996 in Curracloe, my sister-in-law woke her children - none of the family having any previously detectable interest in the GAA - to bring them into Wexford town that night of the homecoming. Prompted by the crowds, bonfires and fireworks, she reasoned they may never see such things again.

Perhaps. But they won't forget them either.

E-mail: smoran@irish-times.ie