LOCKER ROOM: Big Dan rides to rescue of the men they couldn't hang while Dublin's young guns remain, for now, a work-in-progress

IT MUST be slightly surreal for a team to have the game upon which their season hinges get marked down as the curtain- raiser on a dank day in Thurles. Rain falling. People coming in and out.

Dublin and Limerick are used to off off- Broadway status though. And if they played yesterday as a sort of novel aperitif, there was still enough attritional slog about their game to make them worthy of the respect of the attendance which finally dandered in for the second game.

Limerick survived, deservedly, to gain the dubious honour of playing Tipperary on All- Ireland semi-final day. For a long while they would have sat in the stands afterwards and assumed that it could have been worse, that they would be facing Kilkenny.

Then Waterford sprang themselves from beneath the guillotine and the pairings changed again. Waterford and Limerick advanced, a long-odds outcome to a day of hard hurling. Not an afternoon which should fundamentally change how we will look back on a season which has three games left in it but games which told us plenty about the losers as well as the winners.

Dublin, no matter how some of us yearn for things to be a little more advanced, are a work in progress and this summer the progress has been very good. Everything is distorted by the thought that with a little more guile there was a semi-final spot hanging waiting to be plucked and by the worry that the draw in future years might be a little harsher to the Dubs but the glass is clearly more than half full.

In the second half yesterday the ball refused to stick in the Dublin full forward line and Anthony Daly found himself perhaps just a player or two short of what was required. Ross O’Carroll had found a place for himself in the hurly-burly of the game after a slow start but his emergence was hard-fought and by the time he was winning the odd ball Dublin’s need was for more. Liam Rushe was needed out the wing as an option under puc outs and Daly, looking at his bench, would have faced the choice between the bulk and physicality of Lucan’s Peter Kelly or the speed and goaltaking ability of Peadar Carton. He opted for the speed. The hand didn’t pay.

Elsewhere, as they tired, Dublin became ragged and the thoughtfulness drained from their play. Tomas Brady had a tough afternoon toiling neath the bulk of Páidí McNamara and a full back line deprived of young Oisín Gough was audibly creaky through the second half. The cruelty of fate was exemplified in that second half by no better case than Stephen Hiney. The Ballyboden man had an exceptional game yesterday – muscular, cerebral and majestic. Yet, down the final straight, one hasty clearance and one referee’s call for steps saw him punished with two Limerick points. Them’s the breaks late in the day in championship hurling, Anthony Daly will be telling him.

For Dublin, yesterday was a chance lost but the year was one of considerable progress. The thought of Dublin going into a game like yesterday’s as marginal favourites although deprived of the services of Ronan Fallon and with Ross O’Carroll just finding his way back would have been absurd a year ago. To have brought Oisín Gough through to the level he had achieved and then to have lost him at this stage was cruel too.

Dublin are just beginning though, the current panel if they remain healthy have the ability to progress and develop. The rumours persist that Conal Keaney will revert to hurling this winter and, should that happen, his sheer physical presence would be a considerable boost. But the hurlers are there anyway. Fallon’s presence yesterday would have freed up plenty of options for Daly. The panel is outrageously young and has more talent feeding in underneath.

The trick for the Dublin County Board is to keep Daly in harness for another two years at least, to plan for his departure whenever it becomes inevitable, to keep on keeping on with the prodigious underage effort being made and to spread the culture of hurling as joyously and raucously as possible in the city.

The theme when a new manager was being headhunted by Dublin back last winter was that Dublin hurling is at the tipping point. The seniors need to provide sufficient evidence of success that tips the game over into a place where sustaining and achieving success becomes inevitable. That point hasn’t yet been reached but the city is nearer to it now than it was in January. An All-Ireland semi-final would have made a huge difference but the county consolidated its top-flight status in the league and made more progress in nine months than anybody else on the horizon.

Not a time to stop looking forward.

The second game was a curiosity and more of a joy. Waterford, the men they couldn’t hang, pulled the game out of the fire with a rousing finish which confounded a lot of us.

We wrote them off before Justin McCarthy walked the plank and we wrote them off since. We said they were gone for anything between a year or two and eternity. We pointed at Dan Shanahan and said that the gods were punishing him for that body swerve.

And yesterday they took on the game’s rising outlaws complete with boy wonder and threw Big Dan on for the denouement and by the time the end credits were rolling Big Dan was riding off into the sunset on his horse and it was business as usual. Down the track we can hear the Waterford under-21s and the Waterford minors on their way and suddenly it seems as if Tony Browne is immortal anyway and there will be no hiatus where Waterford will recede entirely to the backwaters from whence they came.

Everything we know is wrong.

Yesterday’s games make no fundamental impact on the outcome of this year’s championship. Had the outcomes been reversed in each match we would still have said Tipperary would be meeting Kilkenny in September. Their impact will be seen in the longer term probably. Waterford have thrown a rope ridge over the chasm which beckoned them. Dublin have submitted themselves to another year of quiet study rather than a late summer of happy hype. Justin and Limerick make a statement about their own resilience which few expected them to make.

And Galway have had a summer like few they have known recently. Epic and bruising and character-forming. Next year’s Leinster championship will have serious box office potential.

Brian Cody sat in front of the press box all afternoon yesterday looking lean and wolfish. He slipped out after the first game wearing a broad smile. He returned for the second game and left again. Still smiling. Why not? All the blood and thunder of yesterday still leads the survivors to Kilkenny’s door. Everything this season has that context but it doesn’t mean that there is nothing to be learned.