All-Ireland Club Hurling Championship Final/Birr v Dunloy: Tom Humphries finds Johnny Pilkington, the perennial joker in the Birr pack, in a thoughtful mood that belies the popular image of the player.

Johnny Pilkington ambles in. That he might feel the sun on his back he takes a seat by the window. All around him the air sings with quiet greetings. It's "Well Johnny?" and "How are you today, Johnny?" and "Everything alright for Monday, Johnny?" Words for a favourite son, not a celebrity.

And of course everything is grand. Why wouldn't it be? This handsome bump of the midlands is home. Birr. A sprawling, thriving sort of town. Fifteen years ago if you didn't know what was stirring you would never have suspected that they were making a hurling dynasty here.

Now, though, if you'll crane your neck back a little you can see the little pitch with the pipe-cleaner posts where Johnny and Daithí Regan and the Whelahans and the Erritys and a whole pile more fellas who would become heroes began. The field where they started swinging hurls as Brother Vincent Costin got among them and told them how the wrist makes the ball fly and taught them flicking and timing and touch and all the other magic tricks.

And across the road with its long, half-paid-for stand doing sentry duty is where it was all harvested. The club pitch. A bare bones precinct. No lounge. No hall. No committee rooms. Just a rectangle of green, a couple of dressing-rooms, and some seats for the aficionados.

They've four county titles on the trot won now. Playing the same direct, quick hurling they learned across the road. Nothing changes , except the lines on the faces.

Birr is different. Not your average parish platoon. The club is at the edge of town, physically and figuratively. The people take an interest but it's not a communal obsession. They play tennis and rugby and soccer too and don't feel the need to go to confession about it. There are people in Birr whom hurling never touches.

" Would Birr be known without the hurling?" says Johnny. "Sure it would. I'd say it's a major interest for a majority of people in the town but if the hurling went out of the town the place wouldn't shut down with the grief either."

Birr's story is not the stock tale of a community who express themselves through the game. It's more a rites of passage tale. Young fellas laying in a small field. A Brother with a passion and a schedule for putting down long evenings coaching them.

And finally a generation of the finest hurlers the game has seen. No gable ends. No dairy doors. Just a couple of fields.

Simple story. To be great you hurl and hurl and hurl. They started at eight or nine, freckled kids getting blisters from the ash. Played to under-11 in school and then without noticing it they were under-12s and under-14s with the club. The same lads and the same teacher in the same field.

They played school in the winter and club in the summer and threw in Féile na nGael campaigns and Community Games expeditions. Johnny Pilkington reckons 40 games a year easily and those long afternoons in lines of three and four pulling the ball along the ground to each other - strong side, weak side, strong side, weak side. The mantra.

Nobody really put it up to them. The big rivals would have been St Rynagh's. Hubert Rigney and Michael Duignan. They were nearest. The rest of the clubs they beat handy. They won everything. Crowed about it. Got to be precocious seniors.

Johnny remembers being a sub on the intermediate side in Birr in 1986 or so and lads wondering what he was doing there. He played five or ten minutes, didn't get killed. After that he was a senior.

And suddenly it's 2003. They've put down all these years together. How well do they know each other? Well Johnny plays poker with a few of the boys from time to time but it's no use. They have him nailed. When he has a fistful of decent cards his hands shake a little bit. What can you do? It's 2003 and last week they came to Croke Park for a look around, Birr being the sort of team who always prepare better then they let on to.

"You'd wonder," says Johnny, "is it all being set up for a loss. We're too happy with things. The Young Irelands game, not that they were a great club side, but conditions were bad and to be playing against the wind and hold them to next to nothing and to hold DJ. Then to beat Athenry with everything going right. Now it's Dunloy. When we played them in 1995 we had the old Hogan Stand looking down on top of us. The lad up the top could drop something down on your head when you were taking a sideline.

"It's a different place now and we're different players. We've Joe, Gary, Brian and myself all over 30 and it's going to be hard to defend against young fast forwards."

Whatever happens he'll hurl a little next year. The club are going for five in a row. How could you not hurl. He caught the tail-end of the lean years when he came onto senior. Birr had won the county in 1971 and didn't win another till 1991.

Memories. Brian Coonan is the club chairman now but he was still playing when Johnny broke through. Brian had been there since the 1960s, 20 years of hard graft, the whipper-snappers moved about him in fear.

"He wasn't able to get to the ball so you had to get it to Brian," remembers Johnny. "Five yards either side of him and he'd be bawling at you. It's small things you remember. Junior Callaghan. We'd stay in the field all night pucking around but of course as the night goes on the old light goes down and poor old Junior was bad on the eyesight. He was in goal one night. We called it off when he ran into the post around half nine."

He was part of the wave who reaped Brother Vincent's work. In 1991 Ken Hogan trained the club and got a lot out of them. Since then it's been virtually a non-stop diet of Pad Joe Whelahan. He's not sure why they've all stuck together but they have.

The club may fight the county board but the fights within the club are few and far between.

" The club always looked after players well - paid hospital bills, that sort of thing. In 1991 Adrian Cahill broke his leg. The insurance was looking after him to the extent of half his wages but the club went in and picked up the slack. A lot of clubs that time wouldn't do that."

Today he doesn't like to stick the club with the price of his hurls. He looks at the balance sheet with the glacier-like debt for the stand and he thinks it's a small price to pay to go out the road to Brian Gath with 20 or 30 quid. Most of the lads would be the same.

He's talking and the memories come back. Conversation is the trip-wire for everything. Something he loves - the best part of life is the talk.

"One of the great things about it and it's in any team sport. You take three or four lads sitting down in a pub on a wet Saturday afternoon in November. Conversation? What went on in the soccer. Women. Gambling. Gossip. And all of our conversations come back to GAA and to hurling and back to stories of who happened to what and what happened to who.

"I love to sit down and talk. Some lad will bring up such-and-such a match. The 1992 club All-Ireland. We still talk about how we should have won that one. Last week on a Saturday night the TV showed the Offaly- Clare game from 1995 and the whole bloody town was talking about it. Should have won. That set some memories off."

So many things, little incidents.

They lost the county final in 1990. Declan, Johnny's brother, took a ground stroke about 14 yards out and it hit David Hughes's helmet and went wide. Hughes never saw it.

The next year they were county champions. Beat Clareen, Johnny Dooley, Joe Dooley, Kevin Kinahan, those boys. The first one is the sweetest. They won it when Paddy Kirwan pointed a 65 in the last minute.

Kirwan. That reminds him of the following year, 1992. They played Rynagh's. Kirwan was in goal and Birr got a penalty.

"Kirwan has one awful belt of a ball so he came all the way up and took the penalty and buried it and on the way back he was like a pinball bouncing around. Their full back had a go off him, then the centre back, the two midfielders, the centre forward, the full forward all came over to have a little dig."

They can feel mortality catching up on them. They played Coolderry last year. Young guns like Birr once were. Coolderry have Damien Murray, Joe Brady, Brian Carroll and other lads in whom the county's hopes would reside. Coolderry are hungry. The first day Birr needed to come back from four points down in injury time. Johnny had to rearrange holidays twice for the replay.

"But we came out and beat them well. They weren't too happy. I'd be going out with a girl from Coolderry. They are diehard hurling people. There's no doubt about it but they'd dream of beating Birr. We remind them of who we are. They remind us they have 26 county titles and we have only 17 or 18. It hurts them to know that we'll have 27 before them."

Ah, the crack. After the 1998 club All-Ireland, when they beat Sarsfields, Johnny stayed mellow and enjoyed the week in a low-key way. He'd played well and wanted to let it sink in. The lads, though, the lads got into the high jinks. The day following the final they had a few drinks and went off playing golf and then had a few more and then in Brian Whelahan's place there was a disco late that night.

Fatally the Full Monty was playing in town that night and, flushed with success, half the team decided to give it a lash. Down to the boxers and no further. But when they got to the boxers public demand had gone crazy and soon the night air was filled with the undergarments of Birr hurlers. Johnny thanks the gods he wasn't there. He met one of the Gypsy Rose Lee set the following day skulking through town.

"Jaze tis not that bad," said Johnny to the long face. "It is. Me mother was in the hall watching."

Despite the happy-go-lucky image (an urban myth, he says) he's a pessimist. That means never being disappointed. He worries about hurling in Birr. No Christian Brothers left. Nobody with that insane dedication.

"Look over at the field - the stand is there, we have a major debt. One of the drawbacks is that you draw off the same people all the time for funds. That's a problem.

"In terms of young lads coming through we have Dylan Hayden, Rory Hanniffy, Stephen Browne - but in 10 years' time where will the GAA in Birr be? There might be 40 or 50 kids out on our field on a Saturday morning but up in the soccer field there's twice that. The television, the hype. That's all they see. Where is the GAA going to be?"

Johnny will be here. He's building a house on the family farmland on the Kinnity road. Maybe the only excitement around town will be the echoes of old days. A couple of weeks ago Birr played the Kilkenny county team. Typical of the Offaly/Cats genre. Kilkenny scored about four goals. Birr scored one. Brian Whelahan almost lost his reason.

" That's a thing. When we're playing it's about the only place we're totally honest with each other. The Whelahans will be fucking each other out of it. Myself and Declan would have a go if we were on the field. And so on. Brian having a go at everyone because that's the way he plays.

"That's how it will be on Monday. We'll have a meeting the day before over lunch and then not a lot said till we are in the dressing-room. Gary Hanniffy will talk and then Brian will be keyed up and then Joe Errity maybe and perhaps me depending on how I feel. I'd like to make the most of it."

The most of it. It's a shock to imagine this could be the last time we see Johnny Pilkington in Croke Park. He made so many moments of sheer poetry there; his intuitive hurling always seemed a brilliant counterpoint to the crashing physicality of the last decade.

Johnny finishes his lunch. Just water to accompany it. No fags. It's spring and farmers are busy. Urban myths are dying. Johnny, 33 now, has work to do, life to live. A winter of hurling over puddles and ice is behind him. The bridge of summer and then the five-in-a-row campaign.

They can feel it already: the call of the snug, the warmth of old stories, who happened to what and what happened to who.

Just closing lines to write now.