The world just may be flat after all

In New York last night I imagine that my old friend Dave Hughes made an exception and perhaps took a drink. And sometime in the small hours, if form is any guide, he perhaps threw his head back and gave the Curragh of Kildare a bit of a hiding.

Before he left for the new world we used to have kickabout games up in the Phoenix Park and Dave would proudly wear his Kildare jersey. We slick Dubs always indulged him gently and complimented him on his use of Persil. Give Kildare their due they were always well turned out. Very neat. Then it all got too much and Dave upped and left the country before Dublin finally won the All-Ireland.

Dave Hughes will be a little homesick and headsore this morning but any pangs he feels are as naught compared to my own grief.

You know the story, I suspect. Kildare were three points up with minutes left yesterday and Meath were down to 14 men. We stuck our noses in the air and sensed the old deja vu wafting past.

So, I rang my man in Vegas and wagered the house and accompanying acreage on Meath. Duly, Meath came back at Kildare. I rang my portfolio manager in Kinsealy and liquidised my assets and backed Meath to win - cutely avoiding the penalty of shortened odds by going double on Tommy Dowd to score a goal. Kildare went ahead minutes later but I was still confident. The kids' education fund went west.

So, anybody out there need a six-year-old and a four-year-old to clean chimneys this week?

Kildare won the Leinster championship and still my traumatised mind rejects the fact. I'm pleased for them of course because no county (except the poor aul Dubs) deserves it more. But Kildare being Leinster champions this morning creates a phenomenon similar to that which occurred when news broke that the world wasn't flat. WE need time to adjust.

When it comes to Kildare losing big games, well, nature has always found a way. That's why we in Dublin have always had a profoundly patronising fondness for Kildare. We fear Meath, and always have done. But it has been an article of faith for many of us in bristling cafe society here in the cosmopolitan capital that, if Kildare ever won another Leinster championship, everything we knew about football would be wrong, wrong, wrong.

From the time Larry Stanley got roughed out of football, to the time Keith Barr went chasing Tom Harris like a narky greyhound after an albino hare, there has been a fixed idea of what Kildare teams are like. Short-passing funky chickens.

I remember, in the time of my football adolescence, realising what the precise role of Kildare was in the Leinster football championship. They were traffic cones in driving school. Practice jumps. Mock leaving certs.

They beat Dublin in a National League playoff game just before the championship started in 1974. I wasn't there. Nobody from Dublin was there. We were sitting at home enjoying the last of Leeds United's romp to the English league title on The Big Match.

Dublin played Kildare again a couple of months later in the Leinster Championship. By then there was some reluctant wake-us-up-if-anything-happens interest in the county football team. They beat Kildare handily enough and a pattern was set.

WE knew Kildare had too much frothy fervour and too many nicknames to ever be taken seriously. The Lilywhites. The Flourbags. The Short Grass County. The Rich Hoors. Unlike us more laissez-faire Dubs, they kept their horses in fields and stables.

WE knew they had so much money that they used cash as bedding for the horses. Even still, they were a hoot. They mislaid Larry Tompkins and Shea Fahy and seemed to reach their lowest point just as their ex-pats were winning All-Irelands.

Then they made the mistake of employing Mick O'Dwyer as their manager just when Dublin were dusting down the icons of the 70s to manage their own team. Pat O'Neill and the boys might have been dismissive of Kildare in normal circumstances but having O'Dwyer, the foxy tormentor from the 70s in charge, gave the whole exercise a little spice.

Dublin duly thought up a variety of ways to embarrass Kildare. Give them little leads and haul them back. Score soft, silly goals to turn the game. Terrorise them. Hammer them. Tease them.

Kildare would keep coming back with new fervour and swarming, flag waving crowds. This time they were serious! This time it was personal! They reminded us of the old story about the boxer Billy Conn, who got involved in a deal with some mob type people who made it their business to put people to sleep with the fishes.

There being little honour, and no tribunal of appeal in such cases, Billy Conn had little recourse when he got ripped off. He stewed over the whole injury to his bank balance for some time before hitting on a plan. Billy got a gun, kicked a door down and burst into a roomful of fedoras.

"I'm Billy Conn and you people ripped me off and I'm here to get my money. I mean it, assholes." And all the mob chaps looked up from their card game and burst out laughing.

That's how it was in Dublin during the 90s. We loved it when Kildare burst out onto the pitch and the Hogan Stand vibrated with noise and they told us they meant it. Tee hee.

This year they have beaten Dublin, Laois and Meath on the way to their first provincial title in 42 years. All the old certainties have vanished.

It's a good thing for football this pallid revolution. Leinster has had four different champions in four successive years - a freshening breeze which blows the dust right off our tired provincial championship.

Sean Boylan, incurable gentleman that he is, said it all when he went into the Kidare dressing room yesterday afternoon to dispense good grace and soft words. "You owe it to yourselves lads to go on and win it."

Indeed they do. No point in making the world round if you are not going to make the whole voyage.