Galway have the grace to lift the gloom

On GAA: With one bound the hurling season was free - well, actually with two bounds. The titanic nature of the two All-Ireland hurling semi-finals has helped energise a season that began in a fog of gloom because of its anticipated predictability and the perceived gap in standards between Cork, Kilkenny and the rest of the field.

This general indifference might have been hard to take within the counties themselves but it has to be seen in its context. At no stage during the three centuries of GAA activity have the same two counties fought out three successive All-Irelands.

The nearest that history can come again concerns Cork and Kilkenny who contested back-to-back All-Irelands followed by a home final over 100 years ago. So the level of domination threatened was historic.

Another reason the widespread levels of resignation provoked irritation in the two counties is that it indirectly belittles the achievement by suggesting that the championship lacks genuine competitiveness, although for Cork and Kilkenny the sight of each other is often competition enough in itself.

But it is no disrespect to Kilkenny - the same would have been true of Cork a week earlier - to point out the enthusiasm prompted by their defeat on Sunday owed a great deal to the prospect of a relatively novel All-Ireland pairing, the sixth Cork-Galway final, the last of which was 15 years ago.

More startling is the fact we were within two points of a Clare-Galway final. Only the champions' unflappability last Sunday week prevented such an unprecedented outcome.

History sets its own standards and they prove hard to emulate.

Only last year Kilkenny came up one match short of recording a first three-in-a-row in 90 years. This time around the same final has proved impossible to stage in three successive years.

This is a unique chance for a major achievement in Galway. Should Conor Hayes's team win the All-Ireland they would have beaten all of the big three counties, Tipperary, Kilkenny and Cork, in the run-in.

That would be an extraordinary conclusion to a season that evoked so much listless pessimism right up until Sunday. Most people will be happy for Hayes who had been suffering a hard year since the humiliation by Kilkenny 13 months ago.

Nearly fired out on his ear by the county at the start of the year, the Galway manager has endured to take his team to within 70 minutes of the county's first Liam MacCarthy Cup since he himself lifted it 17 seasons ago.

As a pleasant individual who notably shied away from the dreary protocols of post-hoc assertiveness and "we-proved-ye-all wrong" guff to concentrate on what the victory meant in terms of the team's development, Hayes deserves the break.

The turnaround was reminiscent of June 1991 when Mickey O'Sullivan led Kerry's footballers to a narrow win over Cork within 12 months of having taken a 15-point shellacking from the then All-Ireland champions.

There has been a lot of speculation about the quality of Sunday's semi-final and the now familiar rush to brand it "the greatest game ever". Hurling's traditions make it susceptible to those seeking the instant gratification of having been at the making of history.

Hurling historian Séamus King was withering in his response to similar outpourings after the drawn Cork-Wexford semi-final of 2003: "Journalists have been saying that it was the best game or second best game and I wouldn't go along with that sort of thing. It's a media fantasy that comes from a desire to speak in superlatives.

"This sort of thing is very much a personal, individual observation. There are no scientific criteria. No one has come up with a list of 10 things that have to be present for a 'great' match. We respond to the level of excitement that a game generates. There's more to it than the quality of hurling. There's the physical struggle, the clash of the ash and the contest - all are important."

Former Cork All-Ireland winning captain Gerald McCarthy also gently urges caution in the rush to judgment. "You can't compare different eras. Rules change and that helps the game enormously. In the old days the emphasis was on backs stopping forwards from playing. Now it's more positive. Full back is a prime example. Nowadays he has to be one of the best hurlers. The lighter ball is a huge factor."

Posterity sorts these things out and we're as well to leave it do its job.

Sunday's match was breathtaking in its excitement and implications, one of those contests that you can hardly bear to watch for the almost acid tension. But that should be enough for all who were lucky enough to be there.

Finally it's appropriate that just as Galway hurlers break back into the big time that Over The Bar has been republished. Breandán Ó hEithir's timeless memoir dwells poignantly in one chapter on the inability of his county's hurlers to beat Kilkenny, particularly in the famous 1947 All-Ireland semi-final, lost to a single point after an apparently endless period of injury-time.

An all-Galway Connacht selection had won that year's Railway Cup and the county had travelled to Birr hearts full of hope. There followed the familiar postmortems.

"The following day in Galway the arguments raged in shops, in pubs and along the streets. What was it about the Kilkenny jersey that seemed to mesmerise Galway, even when they seemed to have the upper hand? Similar arguments have been heard since. They were heard again after the final of 1979, even as far away as Finsbury Park in London, where I viewed the game."

Over the Bar was written for the GAA Centenary year in 1984 and so missed the great years of that decade that saw Galway triumph over the black and amber first in the 1986 semi-final and then in the following year's final.

Breandán had passed away before his time, in 1990, and maybe he was as well spared the decade that followed but at five o'clock last Sunday in whatever firmament or afterlife that rewards great writing and devilment there was presumably a twinkle.

smoran@irish-times.ie