It could be a good summer in Dublin

Locker Room: The movie critic Elvis Murphy once surveyed Oliver Stone's canon and described it as the history of great events in America and how come they all happened to Oliver Stone.

I try and make this column pretty similar. The Sports Editor says occasionally that the column should be provocative. He's wrong of course. It should just be about me.

The first thing I ever had published (as you'll see in the forthcoming biopic The Sweet Smell of Access) was an article on the Dublin hurlers which In Dublinmagazine printed and which I felt at the time was unfairly overlooked for that year's Pulitzer.

I prevailed upon my old mentor, Lar Foley, to give a rare feature interview with Lar's only condition being that we do it a 6:30 in the morning. I was at a time in my life when that was about half an hour past bedtime. Lar always knew what he was doing. I recall this because it is the last time I seem to recall being so optimistic about Dublin hurling.

It was the spring of 1990 and Lar's team were tearing through the old league swatting bluebloods everywhere, and showing a promise which would culminate in two Leinster final appearances.

Nothing came after Lar's time, though, except teams generally run by good men who loved Dublin hurling and players who were a mixum gatherum of lads who were good club hurlers and honest triers, the odd genius, and fellas who saw the hurlers as a magazine to read while they sat in the waiting room hoping the Dublin footballers would call them in.

There have been good days and bad days since then.

As a rule of thumb I'm working elsewhere on the good days but have cleared the decks and usually travelled forth on the bad days. Remember the spring of 1998. Ah. The hurling pockets of the capital were suffused with weird sunny optimism all through May. Kilkenny were on their way to Parnell Park. News of the ambush spread so far and wide that there was a large crowd gathered just to say that they had been there on the day.

Kilkenny left town with a 21-point winning margin under their oxters. Cruel. The next summer, Michael O Grady's last in charge, we all toddled off to Nowlan Park in May in downbeat mood. We hardly noticed Dublin creeping back into the game with Wexford.

They were nine points down with 10 minutes left. They lost by a point and Shane Ryan almost equalised at the death. I thought at the time that the team that played that day, built on the under-21s of the previous few years, might go onto greater things.

Shane Ryan went on to football. He was back in blue on Saturday night in Parnell Park and has become one of those players the footballers can't live without. Back in 1999 he played on 11 different teams; Michael O'Grady said about him: "Long-term Shane will be a better hurler. If we were performing well on the hurling I think Shane would have no doubt where his loyalty would be, but at the moment the glory is in the football and you can't blame a young lad for going where the glory is."

On Saturday in this paper Andy Cunningham the Dublin selector said about Conal Keaney and others: "In fairness to the likes of Conal Keaney you can't really blame them for going the way they did. You only have to look back o the start of the league when Dublin had 80,000 at their first football match against Tyrone in Croke Park, And we've had days when we have had maybe 80 at our hurling matches. That's just the reality."

I think Dublin is on the verge of altering that reality. Maybe there'll be one or two more defectors to football but the times they are, Tommy Naughton will be the first to point out that the struggle is still in it's infancy, that three good league results doesn't stand for anything if your summers are short and bitter.

And yet, and yet and yet . . . What makes this dawn different is the knowledge that the work Tommy has done is just the tip of the iceberg. Yesterday's league win in Limerick was remarkable not just in itself but because Dublin were without Alan McCrabbe, Liam Ryan, Dave Curtin and their best player John McCaffrey. They scored 22 points.

Dublin seem to have reached a understanding that has eluded many teams over the years. There is conceit in the city that Dublin club hurling is rough. It's not. Not in the right way it's not. The current team seem to have taken physical toughness as basic default setting for county teams. They match sides with skill now.

Some of us still tend to look at the county footballers and wearily list from David Henry through Conal Keaney and Dotsie O'Callaghan, Diarmuid Connolly and Mossy Quinn and Shane Ryan and Padraig Griffin those players who might illuminate the hurlers. That shop is shutting though and the day when Dublin might genuinely be a dual county again is coming soon. What will be different from any good time before except the All-Ireland appearance of 1961 will be that the hurlers will be of Dublin and by Dublin.

Dublin's success (we'll call it that even though nothing has been won but good structures can be a success in themselves) is a testimony to the change which a small group of people can ring about in any county if they go about their business with intelligence and dedication.

Guys like Colm O'Sealaigh and Frank Perry in Colaiste Eoin in Stillorgan have played a huge role not just in producing hurlers but in spreading a love for the game. In nearby Kilmacud Crokes the civil war which led to the creation of the hurling section within the club has produced startling results. One All-Ireland feile under their belts; players coming through like Ross O'Carroll and the O'Rorke brothers.

Crokes will be a huge hurling story in a few years and we'll all be chasing them. Which isn't a bad thing. The work being done on the Portkabins down in Parnell Park will be paying off by then. The relentless coaching of coaches, putting kids with mentors who can make them better hurlers a half an hour or an hour. The restructuring and simply improved liaison between schools and county. The introduction this year of divisional sides to the senior county championship.

There's a buzz about the place this spring. Kids with hurls seem to be everywhere. Jimmy Keaveney once told me of how he cried as a kid seeing Des Foley leaving the field after the 1961 All-Ireland final loss to Tipp.

Jimmy would have cried harder if he had known that his generation would be the last for decades to see a Dublin senior team on such a stage. If the kids can become the first generation since the 60s to see Dublin in the big time it will bring a boost to the game unlike anything we have known.

Two games left this week. Antrim and Tipp.

Go on lads.