Sideline Cut: The great truth about sport is the one we all learn too late: it all passes by so quickly. It is one of the beautiful contradictions of the game - whatever the game - that young contenders moan through drills on cold evenings while the boys of yesteryear, fighting only greyness and gravity now, observe them from the shadows wishing to God they could be out there. Just for one evening more.
In Gaelic games, the lid has been quietly but firmly closed on the ancient practice of allowing members of the press into the dressing-rooms in Croke Park after All-Ireland finals. Although that progression is a shame from a working perspective, it is probably correct. Given the intensity of attention the elite teams generate nowadays, those few minutes they spend alone in that room as they come to terms with the fact this is the definitive and glorious conclusion of all they ever set out to do are sacred.
And if managers and players are fully honest, they will know accompanying the overwhelming sense of elation and fulfilment is a tiny note of melancholy, a realisation that, once they walk out the door, the team will never be quite the same again.
The truth of that was witnessed in the saddest imaginable circumstances through the fortunes of last year's football champions, Tyrone.
But it is also true in much more minor ways. Players retire or emigrate, managers leave, the spoils of winning changes the dynamic, the camaraderie to which long-retired players inevitably refer as the richest aspect of their playing lives.
Teams are tricky. The skill and ability to channel any number of egos and personalities smoothly into one cohesive force has become the most elusive and sought after component in contemporary Gaelic sport, hence the sudden and understandable phenomenon of the manager as seer and prophet. At the top, creating a team is a slippery and treacherous business, but even down the line, at the relatively easy-going but still deadly serious level of club, it is also no mean feat.
That is why whenever I see a team photograph framed on the wall of a bar or in a hotel lobby, I find it almost impossible not to study it for a few seconds, even if I have not got the faintest idea of its make-up. In a way, the more obscure the better. Although you could spend an evening just looking at the photographs that hang in the Leeson Lounge, for instance, most of the subjects are nationally celebrated so you tend to know what became of them. Captured moments of the gods in all their grace are wonderful to behold. But more fascinating is the gold-framed photograph of the club side in whatever bar of whatever town, frozen on the threshold of something significant.
In a way, club football is the most unforgiving station of the lot, trying to push and shape a bunch of individuals from the same community into a team.
A few weeks ago, at the Tipperary county hurling final, there was a brilliant photograph of Tommy Dunne on the back cover of the match programme. He was sitting in the family shed, and against a ledge leaned dozens of hurls. The names of the Dunne brothers were pencilled onto the wall to denote which group of hurls belonged to which member of the family. Of course, it eloquently captured the essence of what the club scene is principally about: family and locality. All the Dunne's still play for Toom as they try to bridge a decade-long quest for a Munster club championship tomorrow.
Yet while the GAA still prospers on the ideal of players really feeling and caring about their place of origin, it is no longer as simple as that - if it ever was. Because teams are tricky, and when you place a bunch of players in a compact dressing-room, you have different sets of ideas, different beliefs, different likes and dislikes.
A group who live in the same community, pass through the same schools, socialise in the same bars, leads to inevitable friendships and squabbles along the way, a familiarity that can be detrimental to making a team function to its potential. It always takes one or two stubborn, and in some ways mad, men to set in motion the attitude and circumstances that gets a team travelling in one direction. Not so long ago a club player recounted driving from dawn to make it from one end of the country to the other for a January relegation game, only to hear the younger players in the dressing-room regal one another with spicy tales concerning the night before. It was at that moment a voice in his head called "stop".
It is such chasms in attitude and application that pull teams apart. Club teams are tricky. Brothers play on the same team. Best friends play on the same team. People that don't like each other play on the same team. Some players would run around the field for an hour at dawn every day for just a sniff of a game. Others would as soon sit on the long stool, others could take or leave it. Some get disillusioned with the playing time they are getting, others get injured or move to America or go backpacking across the Orient. It just takes one or two occurrences like that to knock a team back a rung or two, unless they are something truly exceptional like Crossmaglen, the perennial Armagh champions. But for the most part, getting things on song for a season or two every so often is the best the majority of clubs can hope for.
Ten years ago Aodh Ruadh, the club in my hometown, won the Donegal county championship. It was a good team, featuring players that went on to play for the county and some that might have. I was living in America at the time and remember calling a friend who played on that team from a payphone on the eve of the final. They were strong enough to go on and defeat Errigal Ciarán in the Ulster scene that autumn, but not quite experienced or good enough to get past the Derry champions, Bellaghy.
They could and perhaps should have won the county championship again the following year, but the record, all that counts now, shows that they did not.
Still, in a county that for some reason has never followed up on the remarkable club tradition initiated by St Joseph's in the 1960s and 1970s, 1994 was a good year for the club. Today, the majority of that team will get together to play a challenge game against the current team. The cause is a fund-raiser for the Northwest Hospice, and because of that the occasion will feature guest county stars like Tyrone's Brian Dooher and Marty McGrath of Fermanagh.
It is a rites of passage played out all over the country at this time of year, when old teams congregate to mark the anniversary of a year that has acquired a permanent shine. In a way, the reunion of a team is both an admission of defeat and also a gesture of defiance. Reunion matches mean days of rueful grins and mistimed catches and, inevitably, many, many poor shots. Reunions are sentimental but true of heart. They give teams a chance to point back at their most glittering hour and remind themselves: we did that. That day is ours to keep. And has it really been 10 years?
