Locker RoomFor a county which rated the under-21 grade so lightly that they didn't bother playing in it for the best part of a generation, Dublin suddenly finds itself with all its eggs in one basket. If the city's footballers are to add any legitimacy to the claim that things are getting better, then the under-21 All-Ireland had best be won.
Last year's strangely flat All-Ireland final appearance against Galway looks now like an eerie harbinger of flatnesses.
And the hurling? If you are a Dub you will have seen a heart specialist after certain events which transpired between the Dublin under-21s and the Wexford under-21s last summer in Portlaoise. The heart specialist will have shaken his head and pronounced the ticker broken. Kaput! Banjaxed! That's how close it was. Enough closeness for a lifetime of regrets.
That under-21 side were to be the benchmark of progress in the game, and, in a way, they still are. Dublin don't often get to lose provincial finals that they should have won.
The bulk of that team travel to Carlow on Wednesday night looking for redemption. Not just redemption - let's face it - but glory. The under-21 grade is the most reliable stepping stone to success and this weekend there is a palpable buzz of anticipation around the team and around interested parties in the city. So palpable that it's easy to forget that Kilkenny will be fielding players like Tommy Walsh, JJ Delaney, Conor Phelan, Shane Hennessy and Ken Coogan.
Mention that fact and the names of Dublin hurlers come flying back. Keaney, Hiney, Fallon, Carton and maybe Dotsie O'Callaghan.
There's a nice feeling that this may turn out to be a game filled with happy surprises.
A few weeks ago, in the same venue, it was odd indeed to see this Dublin under-21 team easing up in the final 10 minutes on a Wexford side which had been well beaten.
The under-21 hurling championship is a nourishing addition to the light menu of senior hurling that the championship structure offers us. A Dublin win on Wednesday night would be a welcome and significant development.
And why not? There are auguries. Journalists love anniversaries and co-incidences, and if you have an interest in Dublin hurling this year is filled with them.
It's half a century since St Vincent's won the club's first county hurling title, in 1953, a date which is significant only for the fact that the club fielded 15 native Dublin hurlers in doing so. That was a breakthrough for the game in the county. The first of many.
But the buzz was there, and later that year Vincent's played an unofficial All-Ireland club championship against the champions of Cork, Glen Rovers. The match was played in December in Croke Park - not the timing or the weather a Don King might have chosen for such a promotion, but both clubs trained earnestly.
Ring played for the Glen that evening and 20,000 came to Croke Park to see a club hurling challenge which St Vincent's won. Fifty years ago. Who knew there were hard times ahead?
You have to go back to the strange summer of 1983 to find hope as tangible as there was in 1953 or in 2003. Dublin produced a minor side that year which did what Dublin teams don't generally do: they beat Kilkenny and went to the All-Ireland final.
That long, stringy fella with the full helmet of hair, Niall Quinn, scored 3-5
in the Leinster final and the city buzzed with talk about how, despite ourselves, the future of hurling had arrived at our doorstep.
There was a long break that year between the Leinster final and the All-Ireland, for which Dublin qualified automatically as Leinster champions. Niall Quinn went off to Australia with one of the first compromise rules teams, and somehow between winning Leinster and losing to Galway in September the edge was lost. The final passed Dublin by.
Some of the players remember at half-time the Dubs being locked out of their dressing-room under the old Cusack Stand and gathering around their mentors on the edge of the tunnel.
Relatives, friends and well-wishers were leaning down shouting hello and good luck, and the half-time break seemed to become a metaphor for the distraction that ran through the whole game.
Both of the teams which played that day produced many fine hurlers. Dublin senior hurling was served well, but the Galway men who went on to play senior (eight of them) got to experience a more serious level of hurling endeavour. Galway had a backbone for the 1980s.
Dublin, of course, eschewed under-21 activity at the time and the team that reached the All-Ireland minor final never played together again.
And of course this is the year that the city lost Lar Foley. The last Leinster senior finals Dublin contested and the last senior All-Ireland the team played in had Lar's stout fingerprints all over them. If there's a better way to mark the year of his passing nobody has thought of it yet.
As you get older anticipation gets better. You wonder if in 20 years the Dublin under-21s who will play in Carlow on Wednesday night will be re-united, grey and paunchy, on a pitch somewhere, and will people recall the breakthrough, the figures which were entered in brackets behind the names of the top scorers, the big performances of certain
midfielders?
How many times will these Dublin and Kilkenny players meet up over the next decade? What will their relationship be?
This is the first generation perhaps of Dublin hurlers who don't fear Kilkenny or who don't need to fear them.
Next weekend the men who played against each other for Galway and Dublin 20 years ago meet up again. One group owned the game for part of the 1980s, the other group served it.
Yet they seem inextricably linked. Their names are squeezed in along side each other in the record books, and for generations people will trace the first sighting of some great names back to that game.
They meet again, fittingly in St Vincent's of Marino on July 26th at 7 p.m. The game is in benefit of the Aoife McGrane King Fund. Admission €10.
Superstar subs range in luminosity from Martin Storey to Brian McFadden. Niall Quinn will be swinging a stick again.
Not to be there would be a crime against sentimentality.
