Brian Peters always comes with the salesman’s welcome. Working the room is his native tongue. A handshake for everyone, a fresh yarn for each stop on his rounds.Peters has been in thrall to boxing for over four decades, ever since he used the profits made from selling sandwiches at Bruce Springsteen’s 1985 Slane show to fund a trip to Vegas to see Barry McGuigan. He’s plotted his road wearing a perma-smile, a friendly face in a huckster’s world.All the same, he got a small bit crabby with The Irish Times this past Tuesday. We were yakking about how quickly the tickets for Katie Taylor’s Croke Park fight had sold. In my blitheness, I had always presumed that if a Katie fight was ever fixed for the holiest of holies on Jones’s Road, the crowd would max out around the 50-60,000 mark. And now the thought was out of my mouth before I had the wit to swallow it.Peters has managed Taylor’s entire professional career and worked with her as far back as 2009, when she was an amateur on the undercard of Bernard Dunne’s world title fight against Ricardo Cordoba. He doesn’t really do umbrage, at least not when he’s in glad-handing mode. But his patience with people underselling her ran out a long time ago.“Okay,” he countered. “But what qualified you to take that view?”He was 100 per cent correct, too. That’s the thing with Katie Taylor. That’s always been the thing, from the very first time she laced a glove. Whatever the outside world expected of her, no matter how well-meaning we thought we were, none of us were qualified to stake her outer boundaries.Right up to this, her final time stepping through the ropes, we’ve fed our estimations of what’s possible for her through the prism of what went before. We’re a long time learning lessons.♦ ♦ ♦Katie Taylor's arm is raised after beating Alanna Audley in the first ever female amateur boxing event held in Ireland, at the National Stadium in Dublin in 2001. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho Let’s go back. There’s a part of the Barry Keoghan promo video that rings out like a schoolyard bell. It’s 46 seconds in, a voiceover layered on to an insert of a very young Katie, maybe nine- or 10-years-old. She’s caught in black and white, throwing a left jab at a heavy bag, her hair hanging long and a slight buck tooth tight against her bottom lip. “I’m gonna go all the way to the very top,” she declares.The recording surfaced in Ross Whitaker’s brilliant documentary Katie, from an old RTÉ Radio bit that had been lost to the winds over time. Using the girly singsong of her voice as a kind of a tree ring, we can date it back to somewhere in the mid-1990s. Thirty years later, it feels initially like a fortune foretold, Katie pulling a Babe Ruth and calling her shot before hitting everything clean out of the park.But think about it. She couldn’t have known what she was saying. And not because she was just a little girl and not because any kid’s dreams are rightly and properly pitched a world beyond reality. More because the thing she was talking about didn’t exist.What even constituted going all the way to the very top back then? There was no top, there was no bottom. Women’s boxing literally wasn’t a thing. By knowing the difference between how to throw a jab and a hook, she probably wasn’t a mile off the top already. How much higher could anyone feasibly have imagined she could go?Ten-year-old Katie Taylor couldn’t aim herself at becoming a national champion, for the simple reason that there were no national championships. To have a championships, you have to have a fight. At the time Katie said that, there had never been an officially-sanctioned women’s fight in Ireland. Famously, she appeared in the very first one, on Halloween night in 2001.[ How Katie Taylor revolutionised women’s sportOpens in new window ]We were no outlier in this respect. This wasn’t a case of dark-ages old Ireland refusing to get with the programme and take its place among the female-fighting-friendly nations of the earth. The USA had a males-only policy until 1993. Women’s boxing was banned in the UK until 1996.Even after that ban was lifted, it took until 1998 and the landmark Jane Couch case for women to actually be granted a licence to box in Britain. The British Boxing Board of Control had refused to grant a licence, with one of their stated justifications arguing that being a woman, premenstrual syndrome made her “too unstable to box”. This was the position of the boxing authorities, declared in public court, around the time Katie Taylor was entering her teens.She was aiming herself at something that had no bullseye, diving off a high board into a pool that was only starting to fill with water. Women weren’t part of the European Amateur Boxing Championships until 2001. The first ever women’s World Championships took place in that same Halloween week that Taylor had her debut fight. She was 15 years old.Katie Taylor celebrates winning Olympic gold with victory against Sofya Ochigava at the London Games in 2012. Photograph: Dan Sheridan/Inpho All the way to the very top? Within four years she was European champion. A year later, she was world champion. A year after that, she beat Canada’s Katie Dunn in Chicago, the fight that convinced Olympic officials to include women’s boxing for London 2012. None of this had been done before.Above all else, that’s been the Katie Taylor calling card. At every step along the way, she has reconfigured people’s idea of what success looks like. The very top of her sport, that sainted place she said she wanted to get to as a little girl, stopped being an aspiration for her after a while. Instead, it became something defined entirely by what she did.And so one European gold medal became six. And one world gold medal became five. And the tentative introduction of women’s boxing at London 2012 became the most raucous, most ear-splitting gold medal of the whole Games. Her excellence forced continual reassessment of what the sport could be.There were three Olympic weight divisions for women in 2012. By the time Paris came around in 2024, there were six. In LA in two years, there will be seven – same as the men. Katie Taylor didn’t do all that but she did more than anyone else to set the weather for it. It’s not a reach to say that she changed women’s amateur boxing, not just in Ireland but across the world. That would have been a life’s work for anyone else.But again, that’s a judgment based on precedent, based on a set of facts and norms that existed before her. You only needed to look around the Ireland of the early 2010s to see the change she was bringing to places beyond the tiny world of amateur boxing.She became a role model, beloved by families across the land. She redefined what danger means in the minds of people who would otherwise recoil at the idea of fighting for sport. Parents who’d fret at the sight of their little one climbing a tree suddenly thought nothing of pointing at a woman who punches people in the face and holding her up as a hero.She became the landmark figure in Irish women’s sport, the Eiffel on the cityscape. Go to any women’s football or camogie All-Ireland for the past 15 years and the match programme will often include Q&As with some of the competing players. By a distance, the name cited most frequently as sporting hero is Katie Taylor, someone who outside of the occasional photo op has neither kicked an O’Neills nor swung a hurley in her life.It took a while but eventually the whole of Irish sport copped on. There’s a throwaway line in Anthony Daly’s autobiography, about a dressing down he gave the Dublin hurlers in early 2014. They had beaten UCD the previous week in the Walsh Cup but it had been a closer affair than their dominance had deserved. So the next time he saw them, he gave it to them between the eyes.Katie Taylor and her manager Brian Peters (left, arms raised) celebrate her successful world title defence against Amanda Serrano at AT&T Stadium, Texas, in 2024. Photograph: Ed Mulholland/Inpho