When hurling's back door was pushed ajar: 1997 and the winds of (reluctant) change 

It's a quarter of a century since the All-Ireland Hurling Championship underwent a seismic innovation. Enda McEvoy recalls a new kind of summer

That was then: Ollie Baker of Clare in action during the All Ireland Hurling Final match between Clare and Tipperary at Croke Park in Dublin. Photo: Ray McManus/Sportsfile

In Wexford they’d spent the winter partying like it was 1968. In Clare they’d spent it brooding. One of the myriad differences between being All-Ireland champions and being former All-Ireland champions.

If Wexford had celebrated a first MacCarthy Cup triumph in three decades long and hard they did so partly for the best of motives. “We felt we had a duty to bring the cup to every school in the county, to do the PR end of it properly,” Tom Dempsey recalls. “It was non-stop up to Christmas. Colm Kehoe came out with a great line one evening. ‘We often imagined what it would be like to win an All-Ireland but we never imagined what it would be like afterwards.’"