Jack Gill, 89-year-old survivor of Kildare's winning All-Ireland teams in 1927 and 1928, has a poem to help him through the hard times. "It's all very well to be happy/When everything goes like a song/But the man with the smile is the one worthwhile/When everything goes wrong."
At which point Galway's Padraig Joyce stuck the ball in the Kildare net, turning the tide in this year's All-Ireland and ensuring that Jack's achievement would not be matched by the Lilywhites for another year at least.
But watching the game from his bed in Baggot Street Hospital, Jack's enthusiasm was undimmed by his home county's flagging fortunes. "Kildare are better, the whole country is better, than when I was playing in Croke Park," he says.
Back then, they played with a heavy leather ball filled with a pig's bladder. "If there was a shower of rain, you'd never be able to catch the ball because it was so slippy. All you could do was punch it."
The night before he won his first All-Ireland medal at the age of just 17, Jack trained by jumping bog-holes near his home in Carbury. "But I was already working by then, wheeling turf and cutting it, and I didn't want for fitness."
On final day in 1927, Jack started on the bench. "But Bill Hyland had a boil under his arm, so I took his place in centre-field for the second half." The following year, he played the entire match and picked up another winner's medal.
Simple though their celebrations were back then, they were probably a great deal jollier than last night's atmosphere in the county: "We were driven back from Dublin in bus called the Gladiator, and given a big feed of rice and rabbit. There were melodeon players and dancing until six in the morning".
Fame as a footballer couldn't save Jack from the economic misery of the 1920s and 1930s, and he emigrated to Glasgow for a time. He return as a qualified shipwright, married and settled in Inchicore, where he has lived for almost 60 years.
Hospitalised as a result of a traffic accident recently, Jack expects to be let home early next month. He says he's well-known in the pubs around Inchicore, and hopes they might stand him a congratulatory drink "no matter what today's result is in Croke Park".
