This will end. It may even end tomorrow. It's perfectly feasible that the Cork ladies will finally feel the cold of a late autumn Croke Park, damned to stand circled on the pitch as the Monaghan team who've twice found them a game too good get their turn to lift the Brendan Martin Cup.
The end will come at some point. Eamonn Ryan’s extraordinary team will fracture and fall and melt away. And when it happens, they will be ready. Ryan has insisted that they be ready for quite a while now.
“After the win in 2006,” says the Cork manager who’s overseen it all, “we started saying that we had to realise that this was all going to end. We had to be sure and not take it for granted. We said then that it was important to be involved in the big days as often as possible.
“That was a conscious thing. We often said, ‘This will end. This is a fleeting period of your life’.”
How well they've filled it. Tomorrow they aim to win their eighth All-Ireland in nine years. Ten of the team that takes the throw-in tomorrow have played in every final, seven of them have started each one. Six different counties have faced them in the final but none have managed to untangle the knot. It's tough, after all, when you come up against a side that contains 41 All Stars all told.
Sage and seer
Standing sage and seer behind them is Ryan, the 72-year-old from Watergrasshill who said he'd come in and give a hand for a few sessions at the end of 2004 and whose life has been woven through theirs ever since. Before they came along, Cork had never so much as been in a final. What has become of them since, he puts down first and foremost to planets aligning.
"It quickly became apparent that there were two groups around at the same time," he says. "There were a number of older girls and they had never had any underage success. They had never won anything – that's people like Valerie Mulcahy, Juliet Murphy, Elaine Harte, Deridre Reilly, Nollaig Cleary. And then you had a group of younger ones who had won a lot of underage stuff and they were coming through.
“Quite often when you get a situation like that, you get tensions. You get younger players who think they know it all and older players who resent them coming to take their place. But in this case, for some extraordinary reason, the two groups gelled and became the one group and anyone coming into the set-up now wouldn’t know who were the old ones and who were the young ones.
“It’s anything but straightforward. A lot of people make a glib presumption that underage success and senior success go hand in hand. But it just isn’t true.”
So why Cork? This didn’t have to happen, after all. Even with the pleasing kismet of all those players coming of age at just the right time, absolute dominance of the scene was no fait accompli.
Ryan has been the glue, much as he waves the suggestion away. He coached his first team at college in St Pat’s, Drumcondra, all the way back in 1959. He has managed the Cork senior footballers to a Munster championship (1983), their minors to two All-Irelands (1991 and 1993), Na Piarsaigh to a couple of Cork county hurling titles (1990 and 1995) and countless underage and schools titles in both codes and with both genders. Yet to listen to him, you’d hardly imagine he was involved at all.
“Before we played a match lately, I was coming back from London on a plane and I was writing out a coaching plan for training that night. And I was thinking to myself, ‘God, how boring a person am I?’
" I realised that the shooting drill I was laying out for them was one I had used maybe 400 times previously over the nine years.
'Watch their reaction'
"I said to myself that I would just watch their reaction when I gave it to them, just to see where their attitude was. And there wasn't even an arched eyebrow. They just did it as if it was the first time. That's no credit to me at all, that's a credit to them."
They can’t go on forever. You would say that Ryan can’t either but he’d ask for a reason why. And nothing you’d offer would come up to scratch.
“It’ll be no problem when it ends,” he says. “I’ll just go to some other team. It’ll be an underage team or a camogie team or a football team or a hurling team or something. I’ll be involved in something else straight away. No problem at all.”
