He is part of the furniture by now, battle worn and indomitable. Kilkenny folk have come to know him too well, so used to observing the stocky diminutive figure emerge from a dust-up with the ball, so familiar with those choppy economical surges from defence, that they all but take him for granted. Willie O'Connor? Safe as houses.
For all the purple prose which has cushioned the starry emergence of hurling's new order, nothing much has changed around Kilkenny. Their hurlers are back in the All-Ireland final and if local folk aren't exactly yawning, they haven't lit the fireworks yet either.
Last Thursday evening, they shuffled into Nowlan Park in small bunches to catch an hour of training and spent more time accounting for absentees than assessing form. Pat O'Neill was not there, nor was Philly Larkin, and Willie O'Connor was also elsewhere.
"I don't know what is up with Willie, he used to be a great talker, but these days he won't say a word", observed one supporter with a rueful shake of the head.
This is a new time. Earlier this season, Kevin Fennelly somewhat tiredly acknowledged that his team were somewhat shackled by their own tradition, that they were stamped with unreal expectations. O'Connor also confessed that the demands of the modern game often left him feeling heavy-hearted, that if he lost his stubborn streak, he could walk away and sleep soundly.
"The whole scene has changed. The level of fitness demanded has taken the whole craic out of it. You would think as you get older the game would come back to meet you but it doesn't work like that, it just seems to get quicker," he noted in early August, just days before Kilkenny's win over Waterford.
O'Connor is one of the most identifiable players associated with the county's most recent period of domination, in 1992 and 1993, the last of the great days, as far as the game's reactionaries are concerned.
He was one of the high-profile players from Glenmore, the swashbuckling Kilkenny club which won the club All-Ireland title in 1991 and which boasted stars such as Christy Heffernan, Liam Walsh, his brother Eddie and himself. They used travel to training in Nowlan Park in the back of a van and managed, he says, to spin a season of good memorable fun around the Sundays of serious hurling. That light-hearted element has evaporated in the heat of the current intensity, he says.
"I sometimes feel that if it (the demands of the game) continues like this, it will be difficult to get young lads playing in the future. Where is the incentive to go out evening after evening killing yourself on a field?," he wondered aloud before deciding, almost in the same breath, that he could hardly imagine his life without inter-county commitments.
Against Waterford in last month's All-Ireland semi-final, O'Connor copper-fastened his reputation as Kilkenny's most impressive player over the past couple of seasons. He all but cut off Michael White's oxygen supply, forcing Gerald McCarthy to change personnel after 26 minutes. The new man got no change out of O'Connor.
He has been miserly all summer, conceding nothing against Dublin and a single point to Darren Hanniffy in the Leinster final against Offaly.
Tom Hickey, the current captain, openly admits that he still looks up to his defensive partner, that he is one of individuals expected to drive the side on.
O'Connor has decided to stay shy of the soundbites this year, but chances are that on Sunday he'll have more than his say, unyielding as ever, keeping his corner safe.
(Profile: Keith Duggan)
