Tommy Martin: They dance with different partners but Dublin and Kerry always have eyes for each other 

In a year when putting games behind a paywall was often an act of mercy, it will be impossible to take your eyes off what happens next.

SEMIS TIME: In attendance at the 2023 GAA Football All-Ireland Series national launch are Gavin White of Kerry with the Sam Maguire cup and Cormac Costello of Dublin. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

Until All-Ireland quarter-final weekend, making sense of this novel Gaelic football season had been a task fit for the wartime codebreakers of Bletchley Park. Spewing out the raw data since January, this season’s patterns were in turns surprising and familiar; troubling and heartening; conclusive and utterly inconclusive.

The new structure was bad. The games themselves were terrible. The games were terrible because the new structure was bad. There were too many games that didn’t matter. Or maybe every game mattered? If you played every week, you would have momentum. If you played every week, you would be tired. Or maybe both? Sorry, none of this makes sense.