One hurler’s achievement becomes another’s aspiration

It was Declan Hannon who said it, sitting in the victors’ banquet with the Liam MacCarthy Cup in front of him: ‘We’ve all marched behind the band out the back garden when we were four, five, six years of age.’

What psychologists call visualisation: It starts very young. Out the back, eighties kids like me pretended to be Nicky and DJ and Jamesie; the Limerick players, most of them born in the nineties, probably imagined themselves into the boots of Henry and Seán Óg and Dan the Man. We all practised our Tá an-áthas orms and imagined landing the crucial clinching score.

We learn by imitation, by imagination. It never really ends.