Springtime 1782, and the thoughts of many Irishmen turned to hurling. Perfectly fine in Kilkenny or Tipperary, where Lord Cuffe and Baron Purcell fielded teams of 18th century gentry and tenants.
But how about New York city, the centre of Britain's waning power in the dying months of the American Revolution?
For readers of the May 18th edition of the Royal Gazette, the Irish knack for celebration in the face of disaster was evident in bold capitals: HURLING practically leaped off the page of New York's loyalist paper.
Thomas McMullin, proprietor of the Royal Punch House - near the Tea Water Pump - had at considerable expense procured the hurls and balls. Now, those gentlemen who had encouraged him were invited to meet at the back of the Jews' burying place on Monday, May 20th, for "a match of that ancient and manly game".
If Nero fiddled, why should not Irishmen hurl? In their case, fiddles would have been inappropriate, since a large part of Old New York had been destroyed by fire when the British occupied it in 1776.
Still, the lads needed a bit of distraction, especially as the rebellious Americans and their French allies had handed General Cornwallis a humiliating defeat at Yorktown just seven months earlier.
"American Invasion"
Histories of hurling in North America generally begin in 1888, when the four-year-old GAA dispatched 50 hurlers and athletes on a tour known as the "American Invasion".
Other than vague references to earlier 19th-century games, the fact that Irish soldiers - and the tavern keepers who catered for them - introduced hurling to 18th-century America has gone unreported and unacknowledged.
Similar patterns can be seen in 18th-century Europe. The Tipperary hurling historian Seamus King, author of the forthcoming book The Clash of the Ash in Foreign Fields: Hurling Abroad, has documented matches by the Irish Brigade of France in 1747, two years after the Battle of Fontenoy.
At a time when the future status of Rule 21 -the 1884 GAA law banning participation by the police and army in Northern Ireland - is being reconsidered, it may be appropriate to recall the role of earlier security forces in bringing the most Gaelic of games to the New World.
Perhaps the service of New York's pioneer hurlers in the British Army, and the apparent loyalism of the game's early American entrepreneurs, made their contributions eminently forgettable for nationalist historians of the sport.
The earliest American reference dates from 1763, when a New York tavern, The Sign of the Hurlers, was offered for sale by Martin Prendergast. Allowing for the vagaries of colonial spelling, the surname suggests a connection with one of hurling's Irish heartlands.
Summer hurling
And in June 1781, the New York tavern keeper Charles Loosley, who catered for thirsty soldiers and sailors near the wartime docks, was organising hurling matches under an Irish flag at Ascot Heath, a racetrack on nearby Long Island.
The matches played in June 1781 and May 1782 appear to have been Leinster or summer hurling, the game that was adopted by the GAA's founding fathers in 1884. But other advertisements placed by Thomas McMullin, in March and April 1782, open a window on a second version of the game known as winter hurling or common, and hint at the promoter's own origins.
Common, as the historian Art O Maolfabhail has pointed out in his 1973 book Caman, is an equally ancient and in some ways more Gaelic version of the game. Summer hurling developed primarily in the Anglicised Pale, whereas winter hurling - historically played throughout the island - was strongest in regions where Irish was spoken.
By the second half of the 18th century, however, common survived chiefly in Ulster, where it remained a popular pastime on the hard-packed strands of Antrim and Down. In east Ulster, common was often indistinguishable from shinty, a Highland Scots game thought to have derived from common.
Both winter and summer games had been adopted by settler populations and the regiments whose officer corps they filled. In Ulster, common was as popular with Presbyterians as Catholics, while in the other provinces local gentry played side by side with the pick of native Irish hurlers.
By 1782, at least three regiments that had spent extensive periods in Ireland prior to 1775 were stationed in New York. One of them, the 16th Foot, hosted a branch of the Friendly Brothers of St Patrick, which met and dined on its patron's feast day.
Ice hockey
In the opinion of Colonel William H. Gibson of the Irish Defence Forces, who has traced how Scots regiments spread the game of golf, it was probably officers of the 16th Foot and similar regiments who answered Thomas McMullin's invitation to join their countrymen in a match of "the ancient game" of common on March 18th, 1782.
With the end of the war in 1783, loyalist businessmen such as Charles Loosley fled to Canada, where hurling and common were played on ice and gradually merged into Canada's national game of ice hockey.
Thomas McMullin's fate is uncertain. He may match the 32-year-old "Mr McMullen" buried in New York's Trinity Churchyard in April 1783, a victim of fever. If so, he rests in an unmarked grave at the landmark Episcopal church on Broadway at Wall Street.
A remnant of the Jewish burial ground, behind which hurlers clashed in 1782, can be found at 55 St James Place, in the heart of New York's modern Chinatown.