THE final whistle blew and you wonder if the moment was as he imagined it would be, in all the years of dreaming it and willing it to come.

Ronan O’Gara stood alone for a second, just as he had done at Twickenham six years ago when Munster lost and the winning of the match had been in his hands. He could have jumped up and run around in a great spasm of relief and joy, but he was quite still. He greeted redemption, if that’s what it was, with good grace and simple gratitude.

Alan Quinlan lifted him and threw him on his shoulder, but when he was returned to earth O’Gara ignored the bonfires of celebration blazing all around. One by one he went to shake hands with the Biarritz players. Dimitri Yachvili, the Biarritz scrum-half whose goalkicking had been every bit as perfect as O’Gara’s, was inching his way towards the tunnel when O’Gara caught him for a warm embrace. Finally, his journey took him over the halfway line to where Nicolas Brusque was squatting on the grass in despair. O’Gara grabbed him by the hand and didn’t let go until he had levered the Frenchman to his feet. Maybe O’Gara’s gesture will have meant nothing to the Biarritz players in the coma of defeat but from O’Gara you sensed the empathy was real. They were all in a place now that he had come from. In O’Gara’s career a circle had been closed.

O’Gara wasn’t as good yesterday as he can be. Not as good as he was against Leinster, or in the last 20 minutes against France in Paris. But the good things he did drove Munster to victory and his mistakes never threatened to overthrow his performance. He binned the bad stuff and moved on.

His goalkicking was imperious, and in a game of such tension and fine margins that was pivotal. Four years ago in the same stadium he missed two late kicks in a narrow defeat to Leicester. And six years ago against Northampton in Twickenham he missed four kicks at goal, including a tough kick from out wide in the final minute, but the wind that day was treacherous. On the streets of Cardiff yesterday it was blowing hard too but not a breath of it got inside the ground. The roof was closed; excuses were locked out.

O’Gara came into the match as the top scorer in this season’s Heineken Cup, the top scorer in the 11-year history of the competition, and on the biggest stage he delivered on his reputation. Five from five was his final tally but it is simple to tot it up now and package it as another neat statistic. When the heat was on, all of those kicks were in doubt.

For technical merit, his conversion of Peter Stringer’s try was the best of his kicks but none was more critical than his last, seven minutes from the end. Munster had endured 20 minutes of sapping pressure, they hadn’t scored for 30 minutes, their lead was a point and the game was on the line. O’Gara? He had committed more errors in the previous 10 minutes than the first 60. A bottler might have choked it. He nailed it.

Over the years it is O’Gara’s mentality which has provided the shelter for his game to grow. Yesterday he was ambitious, flawed and unflappable. He tried and failed and tried again, refusing to be spooked or demoralised.

Trevor Halstead’s try to put Munster in front for the first time started with O’Gara’s vision. There were bodies all over the field, half of them offside, so O’Gara played a dinky garryowen down the short side. The kick maximised Munster’s chances of retaining possession and when it came back into Munster hands, Biarritz were scrambling. When the try finally came in the far corner, it was O’Gara who gave the scoring pass.

When Munster played with dynamism, O’Gara was at the hub. Three or four times he found space in the box behind the Biarritz wingers with withering kicks, once when he checked beautifully in midfield and reversed the flow of the play. It is from these kicks that teams take their morale. When an interviewer grabbed him afterwards, he allowed his heart to speak: “The message from this is you get out of it what you put in. Maybe not straight away, but some of us have tried for seven years for this.”

The journey had made him.