LockerRoom: The Sports Editor stirs from his sleep. He looks around quickly. Still in the office. Still in the job. He relaxes visibly, which is an awful thing to see.
Finally he catches sight of you, lowly and trembling, on the other side of his desk. He narrows his eyes till he remembers who you are. He sees, to his satisfaction, that you have adopted the none-too-proud posture of beseechment.
Although your little voice reassures the Sports Editor you mean no harm, you still flinch as he draws himself up suddenly, looking like a cobra with a moustache. Happy Christmas, he snarls as he hands you a large, blue brick and asks you to go and do whatever you like with it.
Your first thought as you flee is that he has passed to you several kilos of top-grade cocaine, which you are to sell on the streets (or in the newsroom), retaining point-two per cent of the proceeds for yourself. But Irish Ferries notwithstanding, this isn't the Dark Ages.
If the Sports Editor had several kilos of top-grade cocaine he'd be sneaking it into the coffee machine every day to improve the liveliness of his lab rats (or staff), all of whom, he has noted bitterly, contract some mild but debilitating form of yuppie flu when they move from the parlous existence of the freelance to the secure, staffed-up status of the lifer.
Deep down, that's how benevolent the Sports Editor is. If he could give us performance-enhancing drugs, he would.
Anyway, what he has slipped to you is a three-volume history of the Gaelic Athletic Association in Dublin (1884-2000).
It would be a lie to say that this publication is unputdownable. It's very putdownable. You need a team of Sherpas just to carry it home.
Surprisingly, it's worth it.
If you have ever ventured out into the backwoods of GAA history you will find that one of the great ironies of the association is that a body which has been so tangled up in history and so fond of looking backward at tradition has also been remarkably careless in keeping records and archives, particularly in collecting the reminiscences and observations of its players.
The national broadcaster contributed somewhat to this dearth of historical material on the nation's most important sporting and cultural body when it discovered it could retape things over old match footage.
The great symbol of Irish nationalist confidence that is the GAA has until recent decades been dependent largely on British newsreel footage of its own games.
Even still the GAA is careless about collating its own history (the Croke Park museum being a wondrous exception which should be spurring everyone on).
If you ever go to a Superbowl in America (as a paid-up hack, that is) you will find pumped into your hotel room hours and hours of archive footage from a body called NFL Films.
The NFL almost at its inception took upon itself the responsibility for preserving its own history. It made match footage and behind-the-scenes films, conducted interviews with all the greats, and recorded the evolution of stadiums and franchises and leagues.
Surely there must be an EU cultural grant/an enlightened sponsor/a wedge of the GAA's own money which even at this late stage could be devoted to creating as well as gathering that sort of archive.
Until then we shall depend on the services of remarkable men like Jim Wren and Marcus De Burca and Willie Nolan, all of whom contributed to the big, blue brick of Dublin Gah.
Which is fine for now, because with some help these men have produced a wondrous history. Sitting in a large, sombre, blue box, the books don't bother with the modern trend for sexy, well designed covers that might draw you in from afar. All the good stuff is in the content.
Page 17 for instance: a list of the clubs affiliated to the GAA in Dublin in 1888. It's a withering reminder of mortality. Whatever happened to the good intentions of Parnell Sunbursts? The best-laid plans of Grocers Assistants? The mini-leaguers of Mandeville Volunteers (from East Wall)? What became of Leos? De Jeans? Dauntless? Joe Biggars (of Ballybough)? Sons of the Sea? Hirams? Ireland's Joy? And so on.
Back then there was only one club in the city devoted purely to hurling - Cusack's very own Metropolitans Hurling Club. They catered for a sizeable fraction of the 100 or so hurlers who existed in the city back then.
This history is fascinating not just for its statistical curiosities and lists but also for how it limns the delicate relationship between the purely sporting and dedicatedly nationalistic wings of the GAA in the late 19th century.
The Dublin County Board lent support to the Reconstructionist Convention of 1888, which swept IRB sympathisers from the GAA's leadership, and remarkably few of the clubs springing up back then took the names of "physical-force men" for their clubs.
Most politically blatant were the Home Rulers (from Saggart - who wouldn't grant home rule to Saggart?) and the Gladstonians of Balbriggan.
Wonderful stuff in here. Ben Edars of Howth setting off in boats across Dublin Bay to play Dunleary with a band on the pier to pipe them off onto the waves. A Dublin Drapery Derby played in 1890 at Jones's Road (residents protesting, no doubt) between Arnotts and Clerys is attended by "a good number of ladies, who seemed if anything, bigger partisans of the respective teams than the members of the sterner sex."
I was reared on tales from my maternal grandfather of the McDonnells and the Synotts of the O'Toole's club in Seville Place. In Jim Wren's exhaustive accounts of the club affiliations of men and women involved in the 1916 Rising it was no surprise to see Paddy McDonnell engaged up in Jacobs on behalf of the Second Battalion.
More taken aback to see another O'Toole's man called Robert Humphries (using that variation of the surname with the more evolved, sophisticated "-ies" ending) doing the business in St Stephen's Green with the Irish Citizen Army.
From there to the birth of the current century there are stories, photos and statistics.
Topically, UCD feature heavily and the pages in question will give succour to those on either side of the current argument.
I enjoyed, though, Willie Smyth's account of a club championship match in Parnell Park between UCD and St Vincent's
"Des Foley floated over a beautiful point - Jim Furlong (UCD and Wexford) innocently looked up to admire the flight of the ball only to find Lar Foley hitting him a powerful shoulder in the chest and burying him in the back of the net. 'Ye effin culchies,' Lar remonstrated with the grounded Jim, 'ye are not getting our championship.'"
Rings true. Nobody "remonstrated" as well as Lar.
The third and final volume of the series deals almost exclusively with statistics: team sheets from county finals and inter-county matches from long ago; old names; connections you'd never realised existed. You either love this stuff or you have no interest. We loved it.
So did the men who produced this labour of love for Dublin GAA. They won't get rich off it. They won't win prizes. But they have gathered and preserved so many strands of Dublin life and history here they are owed our gratitude.
The history is launched this evening by An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, a man much in empathy (or as he himself might write, empaty) with the Dublin GAA. A good night would make the beginning of a fourth volume.
