Sean Duignan said for years that if Clare ever won the Munster final, Dublin would be full of people who didn't know where Croke Park was. Well, we found it in 1995, with some help from our friends in Galway. And we're back, in 1997, after a Munster final that was so good they have decided to play it again. It was on our way to watch the first Munster final of the year that I was reminded of Diggy's jibe. Because we were lost, not on the road to Cork, but to Santa Ponza, the street of Ramon de Moncada and a pub called the Lucky Leprechaun. We had been assured that this Lucky Leprechaun, on the coast of Majorca, would bring us the Munster final, live, direct from Pairc Ui Chaoimh.

It was a 70-kilometre drive across the island, if we didn't get lost; 120 when we did.

Never mind. It gave us time to do what people have done since Munster finals began, and thousands on their way to Pairc UI Chaoimh must have been doing even then as we circled Santa Ponza for the second time.

D'you know, it was as hot, that day in the Gaelic Grounds, when Tipp beat Cork after a struggle so fierce it's since been elevated, in the folk memory, to the status of a Munster final? It was the first round of the 1949 championship, not the final; and it took two full games, an eternity of extra time and some wonderful scores by a slightly-built forward called Jimmy Kennedy to decide it.

All of that plus the heat and, by all accounts, the ingenuity of a couple of Upperchurch farmers. It seems they ferried several churns of fresh water to Limerick so that when extra time was called the Tipp players could be refreshed while the parched Corkmen played on without relief.

I can't vouch for that, though I was there. What I do remember is that when my mother asked how it went, my father said that sweltering was the word, but the Tipp lads were still fresh as daisies at the end.

It must have been the only time that John Doyle and his partners in hell's kitchen, Musha Maher and Rattler Byrne, were compared to daisies; though Doyle famously advised the others, when they spotted three lightlooking forwards heading their way, to "lower the blades, boys".

Tipperary in the late 1940s was well on the way to its 24 All-Ireland titles. Players like the great goalkeeper Tony Reddin and the lordly centre-back Pat Stakelum were unforgettable. But what made their victory sweeter was that the Cork team, with Christy Ring, Jack Lynch and Willie John Daly, was unforgettable too. And all but unbeatable.

All politics, they say, is local; that may be so. All sport certainly is. It's as if you get the flavour of a place from its team and its followers, and their chance to celebrate local pride.

In Clare, we'd won one All-Ireland in 1914 and the National League in 1946; we could still enter the spirit of the thing, enjoy the sport and aspire to Munster and All-Ireland titles. Players like the great-hearted Jimmy Smyth or the most stylish of centre-forwards, Matt Nugent, deserved recognition.

It took time, an Oireachtas win, two more Leagues and a few heart-scalding misses before Anthony Daly could finally salute the Smyths, the Nugents and so many more in '95.

How much it meant to us you may guess from a story told by my friend of many seasons, Paddy Downey, the former GAA correspondent of The Irish Times.

It's about a Clareman who'd been waiting for a kidney transplant in a hospital in Dublin, but who was allowed to attend the 1995 semifinal against Galway on condition that he carried a bleeper. If it sounded, he must return immediately to prepare for an operation.

The bleeper sounded in the game's last 10 minutes and the patient headed straight for hospital, missing the moment when Clare qualified for the final for the first time since 1932.

Sadly, he needed another operation and was told that if he wanted to go to the final he'd have to carry the bleeper again. He said he would, but he'd make no promises about what he'd do if the call came. We don't know how he fared, but Eamonn Taaffe's goal was scored late - very late - in the match.

We found our way to Croke Park all right. We even found our way this year to the Ramon de Moncada in Santa Ponza where, not one, but many sandwich boards advertised the showing of the Munster final. Not only in the Lucky Leprechaun, but in Fiddlers Green, the Dubliner, Bar Flamingos, McTavishes, Cafe Dublin and Sean's Place.

Tom Humphries made the point in Green Fields that GAA players never move away from their audience. The audience is a bit more mobile these days. Spanish wine never tasted better.