It's official - summer is about to throw in

SIDELINE CUT: THE GAELIC fields are trim and freshly marked in white. The changing-rooms are spanking clean. In New York and Longford the kettle is already on the boil. The football championship is upon us and with it comes the sounds of summer.

As the flagship RTÉ show The Sunday Gamecelebrated its 30 years of broadcasts last week, there was much discussion about the enduring legacy of the original signature tune, which was abandoned when the series went for a flashier and more jazzed-up format in tune with with the digital age.

Judging by the comments of former presenters, people hold a deep affection for the old Sunday Game tune. Whether or not it ought to have been retained was rigorously debated at the time; what has become clear is that the tune lives on for the tens of thousands of people to whom it became a Sunday sound as familiar as the bells ringing for Mass.

I am not sure who composed it but it would be a shame if he/she did not live luxuriously on the royalties for the next 20 years because it was a gem - insanely catchy, full of optimistic brass and uplifting drums - and once heard it was never forgotten. Evocative as a national anthem it awoke the child in everyone.

Back when it was common practice for supporters to stop in pubs to catch the highlights on the way home, you would notice grown men becoming kind of giddy and boyish as they stood there slurping pints and allowing the tune to carry them back to the days when they had dreams of one day featuring in the highlights show themselves.

Some day soon, a manager is going to dispense with the motivational speech and simply play an old vinyl copy of the Sunday Game tune before the game. Imagine that drifting from the tunnel in Clones at 10 past three on Ulster final day! Three minutes of that tune at full volume and any team, even one composed of kids from the Ipod generation, will head out through the dressing-room door feeling like gods.

The highlight show remains part of the charm of championship Sundays, even in today's climate of saturation coverage. But even when live matches were seldom shown on television, the championship still formed a bass-note accompaniment to the sounds of summer. People who did not care for championship and had no interest in listening to the radio reports heard it anyway.

The voice of Micheál O'Hehir travelled with people. The Dublin broadcaster has received homage from many quarters but it is no coincidence that his commentaries featured in an early section of Pat McCabe's dark 1995 masterpiece The Dead School, in a passage entitled Sunday Mornings.

Packie and Malachy Dudgeon are "strolling through the bright and colourful streets of the town with the warm breeze blowing and Micheál O'Hehir, the football commentator, sweeping out of every window, getting so excited that you though he was going to lose his mind: 'Yes! He's going through! Thirty yards out! Twenty yards out! Ten yards out! Oh my God! It's high! Yes it's high and it's - over the bar!'"

O'Hehir's voice was so musical and unique that you could not fail to pause and listen but the GAA have been blessed down the years to have so many commentators with the ability to "call" games with a passion and style all their own. Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh is now, of course, the nonpareil, but there are many, particularly from the local radio stations, whose broadcasts are less straightforward communiques than rhapsodic observations of what is happening in the moment.

It often means you can wait 20 minutes just to hear the damn score. But what odds? You can bet that is down to deliberate and delightful ploy rather than oversight.

But on Sundays for the next three months or so, any visitor to a shop or a pub, any customer waiting on tickets at the bus office or anyone sitting on a train beside a man fidgeting with a portable radio and a headset, will hear something of the championship.

We all have friends with absolutely no interest in sport for whom the combination of a GAA broadcast and a car radio brings shivers of the most primitive kind, transported as they are back to those hellishly long afternoons spent on "family" outings when anything from three to eight reluctant youngsters were wedged into the rear of a Cavalier or whatever and driven to both the seaside and the edge of reason by the blaring voice insistently bringing the details of a far-off football game.

When you are a child and have no real concept of time, it is probably true a Gaelic games broadcast can last for the adult equivalent of four days. And worse, it sounds like mathematics being spoken by an excitable teacher. Nothing, not even the "go" on the dodgems and the melting Brunch at the end of it all, could make that journey worthwhile.

The primary object of the All-Ireland football championship is, of course, to find the best team in Ireland. Most years, including this, that team or county tends to be Kerry. But the enduring appeal of the All-Ireland is not really in finding out who will win; it is more about discovering how long the other counties can avoid losing.

As usual, the majority of teams - including the strong teams - have chances varying from slim to none when it comes to winning the Sam Maguire. A glance at the betting confirms the All-Ireland is an absurdly tough competition to win. Only Kerry know how to crack that nut consistently. But even if another Kingdom title is being flagged as little short of an inevitability, it does not stop the beginning of another championship providing a general air of jitter and excitement.

That is because the championship is not so much what happens in the end as what happens along the way. It is about setting out to see if your team can defy your nay-saying and not daring to hope for just one Sunday of unexpected victory over a stronger county (after which anything seems possible).

In the championship, you live for the day. As John McGahern memorably said in a radio interview, "The day is the whole show."

If this week has been proof of anything, it has been that epochs end quickly. The Ahern age is over and with it, we are being told, Ireland's pale version of the Jazz Age. The high-rolling lifestyles are no more and a return to humbler times beckons.

Through the fatness of the last decade, the All-Ireland championship has stayed true to its own rhythms. There is something comforting and familiar about being on the cusp of it all again: 34 teams throwing hats into the ring and brighter evenings on the horizon.

The championship signals the beginning not just of an epic competition but of summertime and all that it entails. It is about optimism and looking on the brighter side - before we all go the way of poor old Malachy Dudgeon.