There are no shades to a black-out, just the plunge into uniform darkness.

Maybe our mistake is to forget that. To anticipate pyrotechnics against New Zealand when all we can access is a skinny box of Roman candles. Maybe we deceive ourselves against them, forgetting how they make the truth and the rest of us just adhere.

Short of heavy shells and infantry, Declan Kidney didn't stand much chance of putting his stamp on history in Croke Park last Saturday night. The differences between the teams were written into their nervous systems.

Ireland looked careworn, every little set-back taken as a fresh deposit of worry. The Blacks were, well, pretty much just the Blacks. A moving covenant of power and absolute self-belief.

Their authority had a claustrophobic effect on proceedings. They moved with disabling intensity against an Irish team that, maybe Paul O'Connell, Brian O'Driscoll and Luke Fitzgerald apart, seemed to play under a heavy eiderdown of fear.

In the end, Kidney's boys amounted to little more than a line of charabancs parked at the fairground wall.

Inevitably, they were marked by the physicality of the contest. O'Driscoll's busted lip, Fitzgerald's nose, the slender, stud-like graze down Alan Quinlan's left jowl. Yet it was never quite a dust-up either. Ireland just hadn't the punch to make it one.

Kidney is a notoriously cautious communicator, but, if you pulled back the screen of his language on Saturday night, you could get close to his disappointment.

Sensibly, he body-swerved the enquiry into Mr Lawrence's somewhat punitive -- if technically correct -- adjudication on Tommy Bowe's wonderful piece of defensive larceny on the stroke of half-time. Instead, the coach spoke of field position and how, ultimately, an army with wagons so resolutely circled is poorly primed to make an escape.

"I think," said Kidney honestly, "that all the stats in all the matches tell you that you're only going to be able to make so many tackles before you eventually concede a try."

Stark

To be fair, that realism ran through the group. Sometimes stats distil a contest starkly and the All Blacks' gain of 645 metres in 99 carries compared to Ireland's 177 in 62 discouraged any mind games.

As O'Driscoll surmised, the penalty try came at the end of a half, "the vast majority" of which Ireland had spent penned in their own territory.

Too many key men did not show. Ronan O'Gara had a kick charged down by Jimmy Cowan inside 20 seconds and the moment seemed to infect his boot with a virus. Seldom can O'Gara have kicked so poorly and with such repetition.

Donnacha O'Callaghan was like a vague wind; Alan Quinlan like a furious storm, neither having a discernible impact (apart from Quinlan's studs on Rodney So'oialo's torso).

It led to a gentle sense of pantomime, the crowd trying to engender a fury of their own. Keven Mealamu took so long at line-out time he could have been delivering the calls in braille. His darts were thrown in a tempest of noise. He didn't care.

There were little fragments of illusory defiance. Fitzgerald's bone-shaking tackle on Mils Muliaina; David Wallace's wonderful, slaloming line break; O'Connell's successive blocks on Dan Carter and Brad Thorn. Yet, always, there was a profound sense of physical difference.

It was, perhaps, articulated by Tomas O'Leary. If ratings were delivered for candour, O'Leary would be top of the class.

"We didn't play any rugby," said the Corkman. "They played it all. We were always on the back foot. And I suppose that was down to our first up defence.

"I mean the atmosphere was brilliant, but we just didn't give the fans anything to shout about. I don't think anyone on the team could be happy with that performance. Because we just didn't play any rugby.

"You could say the penalty try was a double-blow, especially when Tommy (Bowe) got the card. But we were still in the game. It was something we should have recovered from. But, second half, they just blew us away basically.

"That was the biggest thing for me. Their physicality. I haven't come across that before. That's something we should have matched, we're capable of doing that. And that's the most disappointing thing, that we, basically, didn't front up. It's just a rugby game against 15 fellas. They were more physical than us and that's why they won."

When it was put to him that he sounded despondent, O'Leary did not equivocate.

"I just know that, as a squad, we're capable of much better," he said. "But there's no use talking about how good we are or how much potential we have. It's something we need to produce because we prepared well for this but just didn't step up."

Parity at half-time would have amounted to a victory of sorts, given the flow of traffic towards the Hill. But Mr Lawrence's call pretty much pulled the blinds.

A bit of magic from Carter sent Thorn diving in soon after the resumption, Rob Kearney, John Hayes, Jamie Heaslip and Fitzgerald swinging out of him like green bunting. Yet the TV umpires could not see a touchdown from the big lock and a scrum was called.

Minutes later, Joe Rokocoko sent the wonderful Ma'a Nonu over and when, on 54 minutes, Thorn crashed over again, the threat of slaughter hung in the Dublin air.

Remarkable

O'Driscoll spoke afterwards of standing behind the posts while Carter took the conversion (which he missed) and the players vowing not to fold. They were true to their word too, remarkably holding the Blacks scoreless for the last half-hour.

Yet the sense of contest was dead now. The Blacks had one foot already on the train to Limerick. And that was the most wounding part, the sense of falling to a team just playing off the margins of its talent.

O'Driscoll did conjure one last, defiant moment, brilliantly carrying Ireland into All Black territory with an overlap to the right. Yet Marcus Horan tossed his pass so late to the supporting Quinlan, it all but needed a curator's signature. No matter, the team had been beaten on just about every fundamental.

As Wallace observed when asked of the condition of his body: "The body isn't too bad, it's the hearts and souls that are a little bit down."

Like O'Leary before him, he saw few consolations at the crime-scene.

"First-up tackles," said Wallace. "I think we need to be more physical, one on one. They seemed to get through us quite easily. Not maybe making full breaks, but getting momentum in the tackle and playing off that. You can't let teams do that to you. We made a few line breaks, but they were very good at getting into the channel for the pass and intercepting or just cutting off the options and turning over the ball."

Quinlan talked of the error count and Ireland's failure to string together phases. He spoke of the pressure imposed by the All Blacks and of how "unfortunately, we couldn't cope with that pressure".

And it sounded an old tune. The lament of a team struggling to articulate itself in the white heat of battle. Ireland, as Kidney averred, have not beaten a team ranked above them for some time. Yet now they must.

Lose to Argentina next weekend and they will almost certainly fall into the third band of countries for next month's World Cup draw. "We'll be disappointed for an hour or two but we have a huge, huge game next week," said Kidney. "Trying to get into the top eight is now in our own hands. We've to try and beat a team that's ranked above us.

"So we'll sob around for an hour and then just cop ourselves on, pick ourselves up and get on to the next one."

His winter will take its colour from the outcome.