MALACHY CLERKINon how, after tomorrow, each winter's stock-take will be telling as a great Kilkenny team inevitably starts to fade from view

MIKEY SHEEHY tells a tender little story about the minutes after the end of the 1986 All-Ireland football final. Kerry had pulled Excalibur from the rock yet again but it had taken a ferocious heave to manage it this time around, a second-half comeback against Tyrone steered by muscle memory above all else.

Sheehy’s father, Jim, had been around for all of his only son’s gaiscí but it had never been his way to make more of it than what felt comfortable for them both.

Yet, for some reason, on this occasion Jim Sheehy made his way onto the turf and found his boy, who by then was 32 and had two bad knees.

“He had a serious heart operation earlier in the year,” said Mikey in 2004. “So I don’t know how he got onto the pitch. But suddenly he was there. He said nothing but gave me a quick hug and was gone. I’ve often thought since that maybe he knew the good days were coming to an end.”

Great teams crumble to dust. It’s a death and taxes kind of thing. We may not know the day nor the hour but we can take a reasonable stab at it just the same.

Three Septembers on from the most perfect 70 minutes the game has seen, we can be close to sure there won’t be three more in Henry Shefflin or Noel Hickey, in Eddie Brennan or Mick Kavanagh, maybe even in JJ Delaney or Jackie Tyrrell. Will there be two? One?

After tomorrow, each winter’s stock-take will be telling.

This isn’t an obituary. Nor is it a eulogy. Lord knows there have been and will be enough of those elsewhere. In Kilkenny, they just know that the hourglass will turn soon and they’re making sure to enjoy these times for what they are. Extraordinary days, unnatural events.

“A generation is growing up not having much experience of the county being beaten,” said county board chairman Paul Kinsella last week in the Kilkenny People.

“Last year was the first time some young followers saw the county being beaten in a senior final. I think it is only when these times pass, which they inevitably will, that we will appreciate what has been happening.”

So what comes next? Brian Cody’s best-before date is no time soon but his players will gradually melt back into society. One by one, superheroes in civvies. The names of those who’ll pick up the cape are broadly known by now but the great imponderable is what they’re going to feel about strapping it on.

“The key to the next five years will be the reactions of Richie Power, TJ Reid, Michael Rice, Mick Fennelly, the Hogan brothers,” says Pat Treacy of KCLR radio. “Those lads in their mid-20s, it’s going to fall to them to see how they respond when the team starts breaking up.

“You’re talking about taking over from players who would have been great in any era. We’re not going to have that again straight away. It’s impossible.

“There is a kind of a hardcore B team there that are able to equip themselves well enough. But you have to remember that if you look at the great Kerry team, once the great players go, some of the other players begin to look ordinary enough. You’re never going to get more players like Tommy Walsh and JJ and Henry coming together at the same time.”

Walsh will surely be around for a good half-decade more but it’s no great stretch of conjecture to posit that tomorrow could be Shefflin’s last All-Ireland final. He’ll be 33 in January with two cruciate operations in three years stitched into his soul. This will be his 11th final appearance – he owes the game, his jersey and his people nothing.

Even if he saddles up again next spring, the field has undeniably tightened this summer and an appointment in Dublin 3 this weekend next year is no longer the given it has been for much of his career. Dealing with life post-Henry is a thought that will be making its way from the back to the front of Kilkenny minds after tomorrow.

“We’d always be wondering what we’re going to do after Henry goes,” says Treacy. “But you see, we were spoiled in a way because when DJ went, Henry just took over. There was no gap. DJ retired and Kilkenny won an All-Ireland the year after. Nobody noticed. That didn’t happen when Eddie Keher retired.

“Keher retired in 1976 and Kilkenny didn’t win an All-Ireland until ’79. When the back-to-back All-Irelands were won in ’82-’83, we didn’t win another one until ’92-’93. And when that team went, we didn’t win another one until 2000. So historically, it’s kind of unheard of for your marquee player to retire and everything just go on as normal. But Henry was just the man from the time DJ left. That was exceptional.”

They yearn for Richie Power or Richie Hogan to be the man and maybe one of them will be in time – the job isn’t available yet so it’s hard to tell. But what Michael Fennelly said last week about the panel only being strong from “one to 21 or 23” raises an obvious red flag. When they lost the All-Ireland semi-final in 2005 to Galway, their bench that day housed Tyrrell, Power, Brian Hogan, Cha Fitzpatrick, Aidan Fogarty and Michael Rice. Fennelly himself joined the panel the following year, Richie Hogan and TJ Reid the year after that. There’s your four-in-a-row right there.

Go back further and the seeds of Cody’s first great team couldn’t have germinated at a better time for him. The 1999 All-Ireland under-21 final win over Galway was one of the most important of his reign – and he wasn’t even the manager.

That team gifted him future All-Ireland winners in Hickey, Shefflin, Brennan, Kavanagh, Seán Dowling, Richie Mullally and Jimmy Coogan. What he wouldn’t give to be able to flush an equivalent septet into his panel over the coming few seasons.

The next wave can quite reasonably claim that it’s harsh to judge them on what they haven’t had the chance to do yet but it’s fair to say the straws in the wind aren’t overwhelmingly positive. Dublin’s rise at underage level has the potential to leave them spinning. Kilkenny’s minors went out early this year and for the second year in a row, their under-21s exited the Leinster championship before the final.

“It’s been a long time since that has happened,” says Kinsella. “That is a wake-up call. You can’t be blinded by the fact that you are in a senior final. That is the here and now. The others are the future.”

Winning two of the past three All-Ireland minor titles is an obvious starting point for that future but even here there are caveats. Turning minor water into senior wine hasn’t been straightforward. Of the 2008 team, only Richie Doyle, Conor Fogarty and Eoin Murphy are part of the senior panel now.

Thomas Breen and Cathal Kenny have been around the fringes but no more. A combination of natural wastage and the difficulty of breaking onto one of the great teams of all time has burned off some of the talent.

A theory abounds that one reason the 2008 and 2010 minor teams might not turn out to be the gushers they appeared when oil was first struck is the huge preponderance of players from junior and intermediate clubs. In’08 and last year, only four players from senior clubs in the county started each final. As a signal to the whole county that the black and amber is no closed shop, it’s powerful stuff. It doesn’t happen by accident either.

It starts back at under-14 level. Brendan O’Sullivan was the county minor manager who oversaw an All-Ireland for DJ Carey and Charlie Carter in 1988 and he works as a development officer in the county still. They sent seven teams to underage tournaments throughout the country last weekend and, while none of them won a cup, O’Sullivan was delighted with what they achieved.

“We were more into development than winning Tony Forristal titles or whatever,” he says. “Because there’s such a wide variety of clubs, from the smallest to the biggest, it’s a great experience for some of the smaller clubs particularly to get young lads playing in these competitions. Each club in Kilkenny can nominate three players to play in these squads and they meet up seven times in the year. There’s no training as such for the competition, it’s more a development thing.

“Then as they get older, you see the fruits of it at minor level. When they get to that age, they have experience of this thing and they’re not scared of it. We’ve always made it inclusive rather than exclusive so that every club has a shot.”

The law of unintended consequences means, however, that they will have to be vigilant now to stop another crop of minors being sieved out at exactly the time the county can’t afford it.

The cupboard will never be bare in Kilkenny but it will only take a couple of down years to make it feel that way.

“It’s fierce important that those lads be kept close to the intercounty scene once they leave minor,” says Treacy. “It’s no good if they’re just going back playing junior hurling. It’s being mentioned a little bit now at times that maybe there should be a few divisional sides playing in the senior championship.

“Years ago, there was the Near South, which was a few junior teams coming together in the late ’50s. It didn’t last very long. But there is talk of it now alright and I’d say it will get more discussion as we go along.”

Enough, enough.

These are worries for another day. This weekend, the people of Kilkenny need detain themselves with nothing more than the utter pleasure of it all.

The novelty of being underdogs, the glorious jitters that come with uncertainty. An All-Ireland bagged tomorrow will feel special, like a late drink snuck in while the Gardaí are busy at another bar down the street.

Days like these are for the living and the breathing in.

The future will arrive in its own time.

Whatever it holds.