We’re nearly there now, mercifully, writes Kieran Shannon.

Watching Didi Hamann and the RTÉ football panel in recent weeks question Pep Guardiola’s standing as a coach for remaining stuck on just the two Champions League titles in a career that’s barely a decade old, we were reminded of the opening scene in March to Madness, the esteemed John Feinstein’s season-long study of about the only championship in world team sport that’s as hard to win as football’s famous cup with the big ears.

Just when it seemed hurling was entering a post-Kilkenny-Tipp era, the first national final of the year is… Kilkenny-Tipp. It’s something to relish, writes Kieran Shannon.

Although it wasn’t widely identified as a trend — more reported as a series of unrelated events — an intriguing development in 2017 was the signing by the managers of the country’s top four football teams to stay on until 2020, writes Kieran Shannon.

While witnessing new rugby heroes lift and warm the hearts of the nation this chilly spring, we couldn’t but think of past ones and how this was their achievement too, writes  Kieran Shannon.

In almost any other sport or competition, it would be anathema to a type of observer, especially Real Championship Man: The wretched dead rubber.

It should go down as the Game That Never Was. As if no one ever paid or made their way through the turnstiles to watch it; as if no one ever played that Saturday evening; as if, for that moment in time, it didn’t seem to make the rest of the world fade into irrelevance, rather than the world soon after reducing that game to an irrelevance, writes Kieran Shannon.