Are you a part of the Culchie Amnesty?

IN the run-up to any All-Ireland final, there are feet and yards of newsprint written about the usual suspects: The teams, the players, the managers, their families and the fans, writes Colm O'Regan.

But what about that forgotten constituency: The neutrals?

It’s all very well being a fan. You’ve got skin in the game. But think of us, the poor neutral. We get taken along for the ride, we share the emotion. We read the same previews you do. We watch the match and shout for you. And if you let us down, we’ve nothing to show for it. No cathartic long car journey home, shouting at the Marty Squad or a rake of pints in a salty pub somewhere in the north inner city that’s operating a Culchie Amnesty.

(The Culchie Amnesty is where people who only go to Dublin to look at the Pope and Switzers’ window are allowed for one afternoon to order a Smithwicks for themselves and a mineral-n-Tayto for a small child, in a pub that is normally hard enough to be featured in a Ross Kemp series.)

In deciding who they want to win, the neutral will often make a hierarchy of who deserves to win. The most deserving winner is the county which has taken up the most of our emotional energy thus far.

Last weekend was a good one for the neutral because officially now we no longer need to worry about Joe Canning and Galway. That’s been scratched off the neutral’s to-do list.

I know many of us are walking lighter this week because of it.

Emotional scenes in Galway as family and fans welcomed home All-Ireland hurling champions and the Liam McCarthy cup pic.twitter.com/13Lexfrvr8

— RTÉ News (@rtenews) September 4, 2017

Waterford can win it next year, preferably with all of the team who lost on Sunday and John Mullane to come on for five minutes at the end. Kilkenny don’t need to win it ever again really. Nearly every Kilkenny citizen has an All-Ireland medal, even toddlers (going well in toilet-training, them lads).

Tipperary are fine for a while. Clare are ok. With the droughts they’ve had, they’d survive on seaweed for decades. It has to be Limerick after Waterford. They haven’t won in colour. Then Offaly need it because they have to live next to Tipp.

Laois won it once but that was in the days when you generally scored more goals than points because the sliotar was a stone and your hurley was a branch of a tree so I’m not going to worry about them. London won it in 1901, beating Cork by four points, a result repeated 20 years later with the Treaty.

This coming Sunday is simple. It must be Mayo. I don’t know whether the neutral can take another Mayo defeat. But maybe they are a metaphor for the exquisite longing that pervades life itself. Do we ever achieve what we truly want? If they win, what do we do then? They are the simmering romance in a sitcom — Niles Crane and Daphne Moon, Maddie and David in Moonlighting. Once they get it together will the series lose its spark?

Still though I hope they beat the Dubs. The neutral admires Dublin. They are the best but they are Cersei Lannister. Just when we think they might be the slightest bit ruffled, they bring in resources we don’t even know about. And they’ve got more money than anyone else put together. Mayo are Jon Snow, heroic and inexplicably make bad decisions at crucial moments. If Dublin lose, they’ll be fine. The disappointment will be diluted by all there is to do in Dublin — theatres, public transport, Starbucks every 40 yards, and the possibility of seeing someone from Fair City on the street.

If Mayo win we can all get on with the rest of our lives. That obviously means it’s Cork for the double next year so. The neutrals won’t like it but who cares what they think?