Relief is still the primary emotion felt by Peter O'Mahony when he reflects on Munster’s improbable but highly impressive United Rugby Championship success.
It’s seven weeks on from their final victory over the DHL Stormers in Cape Town, which came on the back of play-off victories on the road in Glasgow and in Dublin against Leinster.
And as O’Mahony strolls into a conference room in Ireland's High Performance Centre in Abbotstown to chat to a group of reporters you can almost see the spring in his step, the weight off his shoulders.
The back row has been Munster skipper for 10 years, he always fronted up but was never quite able to hide the frustration at being asked the same questions time after time as Munster failed to get over the line.
That’s all changed now.
"Yeah, it was nice," he says about walking into camp a champion.
"It was more relief for me than anything. It's been 10 years since I was asked to captain Munster and obviously, very little to show for it.
"It was one of the proudest memories of my career, lifting it with Keith [Earls] having gone through a lot together.
"Obviously I could have picked a big chunk of guys to do it with but I thought he was a fitting man with everything that's he's done for the club.
"Coming back in here, it was two or three weeks after it, it was in the back of the memory a little bit.
"We're kicking on and a couple of powerful meetings in here at the start, you flip the page fairly quickly.
"But it was great, obviously, a huge leap. Hugely proud of it."
The 33-year-old already had four Six Nations winners medals to his name and has captained the Lions but success with his home province was just "different".
"I've been lucky to win a handful of things with Ireland and as I said it was kind of more relief than elation," he adds.
"I've been at it for a long time, and thinking it wasn't going to happen to be honest with you, because you're at it so long and it's a difficult thing to do now, and it's probably an even harder competition these days with the way it's structured.
"After I came back from the Six Nations, the run-in that we ended up with, it was a hard way to go about it, away from home for seven or eight weeks and spending a month or whatever in South Africa, it was a difficult way to do it, but happy days."
Ireland have been in camp since the middle of June as they prepare for what they hope will be a long stint in France.
That URC run-in experience can help, right?
"It's tough though," adds the Corkman.
"It's tough on the body, even being away from home for that long and the distances that we were doing, the long-haul stuff is tough and takes a toll on you.
"But it gives you a good sense of how to navigate trips and navigate hostile environments, the Aviva, being away in South Africa.
"I thought the two weeks in South Africa was a turning point for us big time, it stood to us massively.
"Having taken a beating from the Sharks, to go back over and beat the Stormers for the first time in a long time at home and then to get the draw (v Sharks), probably should have won that game, I thought that gave us a massive amount of belief that we could go and do something special, and it stood to us."
O’Mahony, who has 94 Ireland caps, is facing into his third World Cup and while he’s not the type to shout it from the rooftop, a team that is ranked number one in the world, off the back of a series win in New Zealand and a Grand Slam, can only have one goal in mind.
"I doubt you go into any team that is going to compete in the World Cup and someone is going to tell you they want to come fourth," he says when asked about winning the World Cup.
"That's what you have to compete with, everyone is in the same position training their holes off and working as hard as they can.
"You're going to come up against the best version of every country you play in the tournament.
"Everyone has ambitions to win it outright, everyone goes to France wanting to win it.
"It’s a different animal going and doing it, that's what we’re training to do at the moment, training in environments that are difficult, testing the limits of ourselves.
"Obviously we have a huge amount of experiences in the last two years and beyond in different scenarios we have gone through that we will all fall back on at different times.
"You have got to be ambitious and this group and coaching staff are ambitious. We certainly won’t shy away from that."
One man who will possibly be standing in his way is club team-mate Jean Kleyn, one of Munster's stand-out performers in the campaign.
The lock's form was such that an Ireland re-call, four years after winning five caps, would not have been a major surprise. .
In the end Andy Farrell never called but he's in the World Cup mix thanks to World Rugby eligibility rules that allowed for players who had not played internationally for three years to switch countries.
South Africa native Kleyn earned his first Springboks cap against Australia last weekend.
"Yeah we were watching a re-run of it there, him and RG [Snyman, Munster lock] in the second row there at the end of the game," said O'Mahony.
"I was delighted for him. I reckon he was one of our best players of the year over the space of 12 months, massive performances, unbelievably consistent, unbelievably fit.
"Unreal for us this year. I was delighted to see him get capped for his home country."
