Players — even Henry — may come and go but Kilkenny will never break

This tent, it seems, is pitched here forever.

When Mick O’Dwyer’s great Kerry team were beaten by Cork down in Killarney in ‘87 the Bomber Liston pronounced the greatest football show on earth was over, that you could fold up the marquee.

Ger Loughnane borrowed the same phrase in a recent conversation with us when recalling his thoughts after his Clare team’s 2000 defeat in Cork to Tipp. And some thought you could have said the same about Kilkenny after their defeat to Cork in Thurles last year. Certainly they thought people said it. Yet it goes on. They go on, and the remarkable thing is it clearly will go on even after Henry.