ON GAELIC GAMES:It's likely the true impact of this Kilkenny side won't be felt until the team passes into history, writes SEÁN MORAN

HISTORY IN the making: a cliched phrase, but an unarguable statement of where hurling and the GAA find themselves this week. It’s an ambivalent place in many ways. Serial success creates treasured memories in the anointed counties, but for the rest of the country there’s the dichotomy between those satellite admirers who want to see great teams flourish and others who want to see change, a bit of variety on the roll of honour.

You can’t be categorical about this, but it’s more than likely that in the strong hurling counties the sight of one of their number dominating the game becomes at best tedious. Among those, however, with no serious aspirations towards winning a Liam MacCarthy Cup, there is more likely to be identification with a superpower.

Even in the matter of supposedly the most black-and-white determinant of allegiance, a successful Dublin team, it was possible to find pockets around the country that, for whatever reason, were supporters of the metropolitan footballers in the 1970s.

More obviously, there has always been a tradition of support for Wexford hurling in parts of Carlow and for Kerry football in contiguous areas of Limerick.

Neighbourhood can count either way, though. Provincial rivals might in some cases not be able to bear the prospect of having the new champions across the border, grinning triumphantly at them for the next nine months. For all the protestations of Ulster collegiality, it was quietly suggested at the time that Tyrone’s narrow defeat in the 1995 All-Ireland football final was greeted as enthusiastically in Derry as it was in Dublin.

Five is the magic number. In the history of Gaelic games there have been legendary sides that have lived long into history on the basis of a four-in-a-row – as the current Kilkenny team will regardless of Sunday’s outcome. Wexford are remembered for the anomaly of being the first football supremacists despite being an almost exclusively hurling force in later years.

Kerry is the only county to have achieved the feat across generations, with two teams winning four successive All-Irelands 50 years apart.

Up until last year Cork exclusively had managed the feat in hurling, and much has been written about the extenuating circumstances of the early 1940s, when the foot-and-mouth epidemic hit Kilkenny and Tipperary.

As the leading counties on senior All-Ireland rolls of honours – 36 each, although Cork’s are an amalgam of hurling and football – it was statistically more likely they would record serial titles (and Cork could argue that, combining codes, they won six-in-a-row, 1941-46).

Kilkenny’s remorseless piecing together of their four-in-a-row has been impressive. Unbeaten in that time during an era when a slip-up isn’t necessarily fatal, their final wins have been at times awesome, starting with the dismantling of Cork’s game plan and three-in-a-row ambitions in what was a far more emphatic victory than the three-point winning margin of 2006.

The following two years were never going to be lost, and if the defeat of Limerick was relatively relaxed the champions had lost two of their most influential players by half-time, and in 2008 the hurling exhibition and sense of a team playing against itself made the day memorable.

Meeting and repelling the most convincing challenge of the four 12 months ago had to be achieved despite only a moderate performance by maximising opportunities that arose and taking the breaks. The penalty might have been questionable, but the score that killed Tipp was the second goal.

Winning five successive elite trophies of any sort in any sport is an achievement. Gaelic games isn’t protected from multiple success in the way many professional sports are with salary caps and prioritised draft selections, but, similarly, a county capable of dominating has to build that dominance from its own resources, making the best of what’s available.

It’s interesting that five-in-a-rows have a resonance in other sports even when there are no barriers to such achievement. In English soccer, for instance, the league championship – Division One or Premiership – has still not been won by the same club in five successive seasons.

In the global indigenous sports such achievement is also rare. The AFL, for instance, has seen just one four-in-a-row, dating to Collingwood’s supremacy in 1927-30, and since the introduction of salary caps 20 years ago that has still not been emulated.

American football still hasn’t produced one, whereas it’s happened just once in baseball during the reign of Casey Stengel’s New York Yankees, 1949-53.

The remarkable things about Kilkenny’s history of success is that, first, they started winning All-Irelands much later than their nearest rivals on the roll of honour – by their first in 1904, Cork and Tipp already had six each – and, second, that their consistency is such that the titles have been for the most part spread out so evenly there hasn’t historically been much in the way of multiple success and up until 2007 the county still had to win three-in-a-row on the field of play.

This apparent reluctance to put together sequences has been well buried at this stage with Brian Cody’s side on the verge of the county’s eighth All-Ireland in 11 seasons – Mick O’Dwyer’s Kerry footballers won eight titles over his first dozen years in charge.

There will be arguments about the depth of competition in recent years, but by definition great teams and their winning sequences come about because they are so far ahead of the opposition.

Like many other things, it’s likely the true impact of Kilkenny won’t be felt until the team passes into history. In the here and now there may be admirers and those who appreciate that something of historical significance is taking place, but it’s happening in front of our eyes in real time rather than pulsing through the digitally stored images of matches past.

I remember a correspondent chiding me for suggesting Mick O’Dwyer’s Kerry may have been the best football team in history. He wrote that he had seen both of the county’s four-in-a-row teams and considered the 1929-32 side to be superior.

There will, presumably, be children present on Sunday who in 70 or 80 years time can say they saw the great Kilkenny team at the beginning of the century and give informed comparative opinions.

And in the meantime it will give the rest of us plenty to talk about too.