Tommy Martin: Enjoy this magnificent hurling summer. Autumn is coming

If Gaelic football resembles the three-point turn scene in Austin Powers, trying to back its way out of tactical and structural dead ends, hurling seems designed to accommodate each modern rationalisation and just get better.

18 May 2024; TJ Reid of Kilkenny signs autographs after the Leinster GAA Hurling Senior Championship Round 4 match between Dublin and Kilkenny at Parnell Park in Dublin. Photo by Daire Brennan/Sportsfile

If the hurling summer is a festival, then the Leinster Championship can sometimes feel a long way from the main stage. Where Munster is all crowd-surfing and guitar solos, the other province is typically your slam poetry tent, playing to small crowds of chin-stroking aficionados.

Still, it says something about the moment the ancient game is having that even the margins of its carnival season are an absolute riot. Although the power chords from the previous weekend at Páirc Uí Chaoimh were still drifting in the air, try telling anyone at Parnell Park last Saturday that they weren’t having as much fun as their southern cousins.