Hope the essential fuel for a successful championship

Mid June and attractive hurling stretching before us, well beyond this Sunday’s contests.

Pause and smell the closeness? It was far from a given, the intrigue. Public mood was subdued, after the re-emergence of traditional colours cricked expectation. Kilkenny and Tipperary in September 2014 operated twice at a level so high as to induce vertigo.

Thankfully, this year’s league semi-finals let out the choke. Remember the context. Clare’s wonderful victory in 2013 had come to seem something of a Ponzi scheme, Davy Fitz’s seven or eight different ways of hurling actually one-track overreliance on a few personnel.