Past maths: the journey began with a horrible defeat in Lens, the Eddie O'Sullivan years brought three Triple Crowns while Munster's Heineken Cup exploits showed that Irish teams could win

Sometimes it feels like life would get bored with itself if it didn't keep finding little ways to stay entertained. Life could have done a million different things with Warren Gatland, for example. It could have left him pottering away in New Zealand in the autumn of 2007, ready to have a go at running a Super 12 team (as they were then) before maybe eventually working his way up to the All Blacks. It could have led him to say thanks but no thanks to the men from the WRU when they came calling back then in search of someone to lead Wales out of the gutter they'd been left in by Fiji at the World Cup. He could have been anywhere in the world yesterday other than in the Millennium Stadium.


But life has a much better imagination than that. Life decided instead that it would be much more fun if the man who'll forever be synonymous with the worst night in modern Irish rugby history was present for the best one. That the coach who was there both for Lens in 1999 and the revival that came in its aftermath was here to see it all work out in the end. He can't have enjoyed it but it would be nice to find out that at some point last night he was told he was entitled to feel some small measure of pride.


Because this win didn't just cap a Grand Slam, no more than it was the icing on the cake of a single season. When Brian O'Driscoll hoisted the Six Nations trophy last night, it was the culmination of a decade's work, one that has transformed Irish rugby to an unrecognisable degree. When O'Driscoll made his debut on the pre-World Cup Australian tour that year, professionalism was like temperance – a matter of course in the rest of the world, a matter of indifference bordering on disdain here. Indeed, in Brendan Fanning's book From There To Here, an IRFU member describes the period from '95 to Lens as "an absolute f**k-up altogether". Lens, he said, "was a catharsis point where everybody said: 'Okay, we've reached it, now we can either play around with the professional game or get seriously into the professional game.'"


The road back started under Gatland and it started with O'Driscoll's hat-trick in Paris the following spring. Ireland had been given a hiding in Twickenham and had found their feet against Scotland on the famous day when Ronan O'Gara, Peter Stringer, John Hayes, Shane Horgan and Simon Easterby made their debuts but this was different. This was the start. And in the words of Joey The Lips Fagan in The Commitments, once you have a start, the rest is inevitable.


So what changed? Countless things. Everything from expectations to body shapes, from attitudes to the laws, from playing staff to coaching staff to the colossal growth in interest all over the country from people who wouldn't previously have crossed the road to watch a rugby match. The Eddie O'Sullivan years brought three Triple Crowns and even a Grand Slam decider (albeit an ultimately humbling one against an England side on the verge of winning the World Cup), while in the background the Heineken Cup was becoming arguably the engine that drove everything.


Paul O'Connell once told a story from the IRUPA awards night in 2004, the year of their first Triple Crown together. The former England second row Martin Bayfield was a guest speaker and when introducing him on stage, they played a tape of Girvan Dempsey's try during Ireland's win at Twickenham that year and the slagging was relentless. O'Connell got bored of it though. "It was good to see all the clips again on the big screen," he said at the time, "but it was a pity that the whole point of showing the try at Twickenham seemed to be so that they could slag yer man Bayfield. We should be looking to change that attitude a bit. Everyone gets so excited when we beat England but it shouldn't be such an uncommon occurrence. We haven't come all this way just to be content with that."


With six wins over England in this decade, the days of it being an uncommon occurrence are gone. O'Connell was a monstrous presence even then at only 24 and just two years after his try-scoring debut against Wales in O'Sullivan's first Six Nations game in charge. Along with O'Gara and Anthony Foley he was becoming a leader in a Munster team that was developing an other-worldly ability to come out on the right side of insufferably tight scorelines. The Heineken Cup they ached for finally came at the third attempt in 2006, on a jailbreak of an afternoon in the very stadium where they crowned their international careers last night.


All the while, Ireland players were learning to believe in themselves. Keith Wood had been a lone self-assured voice in the wilderness for so long but now it was a given throughout the squad. In O'Driscoll, they had a captain for whom a crisis of confidence was a sudden thought that he might be only as good as everybody else on the pitch. Six Nations Championships were regularly prefaced by him saying that yeah, Ireland were ready to go and win the thing now, a thought that would have been laughed out of the room up to then. O'Gara would throw in the odd chippy jibe about there being no reason to believe that players in other countries were better than the ones here. They just had to go and back it up.


They should have done so 2007 but the unveiling of Croke Park to the world went awry just at the end when it looked like they'd turned a shocking start around. The World Cup was such a disaster later that year that it wasn't an unreasonable assumption in its aftermath that these players might never win a thing with Ireland.


Some of them didn't. As Ireland went on their lap of honour last night, a thought was spared for the likes of Shane Horgan and Denis Hickie, Alan Quinlan and David Humphreys, Kevin Maggs and Reggie Corrigan, Foley and Dempsey and Easterby and the rest. And for Eddie O'Sullivan too. The Grand Slam was won yesterday but it was a decade in the earning.