It was the antic summer of 1995 and the Dublin team were holding a pre All-Ireland press night in the St Vincent's grounds on the Malahide Road. Maybe two dozen journalists and a few hundred kids were gathered for the occasion.
The Dubs kicked a ball around for a bit, stretching their limbs while the multitude watched. Then, as if controlled by some remote signal, the detente broke. The kids moved as one, running urgently and fanatically towards Jason Sherlock. And that was how he spent the press night, signing notebooks, programmes, jerseys and body parts as county board officials tried to control the crowd. In fact, that was how he spent the summer. The GAA's first Beatle. Boom Boom Boom Let Me Hear You Say Jayo.
He made enough of a difference to make Dublin's also-rans All-Ireland winners that summer. At the GOAL challenge a few days after the trophy was lifted they had to abandon the game as Jayomania spilled on to the field. September ended as it had begun, with the craziness at full tilt.
No 19-year-old has had a summer like it. Picture it. You grow up in Finglas, a kid with talent for most games you try. Eventually the Dubs come calling and all things converge. A long hot summer, an All-Ireland, a couple of wonderful goals to propel the team through. The city erupts. You are the poster boy for everything. Liverpool are said to be slavering after you. You play for the Irish under-21s. Life is rocket-fuelled. You are expected to stretch yourself a thousand ways, disappoint nobody and the very thin bottom line is that if you try to earn a few bob out of it all you'll be despised.
He came through it and values the good parts better than the bad. Great time. Great experience. Good friends. Four years later he's still standing and his achievements may not shine as luminously but he's pulled off quite a trick nonetheless. Keeping on is the secret. He has achieved his childhood ambition to make a living out of sport and he's done it his way.
Jason Sherlock is sitting in the snug, sipping a pint of water and talking about a guy he played a bit of underage with at inter-county level. Good player, contender status but now he spends every weekend washing himself through with gallons of lager. Football fits in with the drinking.
"He's one of those guys that people say `remember him?' I hate that `remember him' stuff, I'd hate that to happen to me. Whatever you've got, you've to make the most of it."
And he has done that in a manner which displays two fingers to the begrudgers. He hasn't wasted what he has, he's parlayed the talent into a living. He grew up wanting to be a professional athlete and that is what he is today. The Dubs, his highest-profile activity, pay nothing but Shamrock Rovers bring in a wage and the spin-offs from his sporting life have brought him a burgeoning TV career and a stream of other activities. He co-presents the successful youth-oriented sports programme Rapid for RTE and COCO productions.
He's not scoring goals for Liverpool but definitively he hasn't fallen flat on his face. He carries the knowledge that there were many who hoped that he would do just that.
Robust criticism and worse has accompanied Sherlock from the start, even in the days when Jayomania was in full flower. Fellow players denied him an All Star in 1995; a Dublin underage selector spat at him on the sidelines of a game the following summer; Mickey Whelan, the Dublin manager for a couple of years, marked his managerial debut with a postmatch press conference featuring a row over Sherlock's whereabouts.
Last summer finished badly for instance, Sherlock trailing off Croke Park substituted as a meek Dublin side made a little modern history by succumbing to Kildare in the championship. He thought for a while that things would be difficult and considered the possibility that he wouldn't be figuring in Tom Carr's plans this year.
Then Na Fianna, bolstered by the arrival of his friend Mick Galvin from Oliver Plunkett's, marched through the Dublin championship to the county final. Sherlock played in the half forwards most of the way but made sufficient impact to avoid being written off. Earlier this year he got his wish to play full forward for the club and scored 3-1 first time out against St Anne's. There was a certain inevitability that come the championship he would be called upon at some stage.
The return as a substitute in the drawn game against Laois wasn't all clarions and trumpets of course. The next morning Eugene McGee, writing in the Irish Independent, stated: "If Jason Sherlock is the first man to be brought in to bolster the Dublin forward line then they really must be in a pathetic state when it comes to quality forwards . . . I cannot believe that in all of Dublin there is not a better forward."
"I know," says Sherlock picking the words carefully, "I have this thing, there are people out there who think I deserve abuse or criticism or whatever whenever I show my face. I don't know what I did to upset them or how I could have handled things different. It doesn't bother me too much. I used to motivate myself with it, I used to say that I'd show them and give them the finger and all that but now I try to motivate myself with positive things. It doesn't hurt me. It makes me angry sometimes but you learn to handle it. "That thing McGee wrote, that's as much a criticism of Tommy Carr and the selectors as it is of me. Yet we were in a league final and we're in a Leinster final."
Sherlock himself just keeps working hard. He tries to live his life now like a professional athlete, looking after himself and finding a discipline which the arrival of a seven-month-old daughter has helped fasten.
The demands of a TV career, Shamrock Rovers, Na Fianna and the Dubs aren't always compatible but with goodwill from everyone he's got through. Last summer he even travelled to Donegal by helicopter to play for Rovers after a county championship game with Na Fianna.
Tomorrow it's Meath again. Sherlock's first Leinster final was the famous 10-point thrashing of the Royals so he's not afflicted by any hang-ups. There is a body of opinion in his club and beyond that he would be best deployed at full forward but Sherlock himself bows to the excellence of Ian Robertson in that position so far and concedes that at the best of times it is difficult for a manager to pick a full forward as diminutive as he is.
"My job is to keep moving, cause trouble and stretch people. I know forwards get judged by scores but it's never been like that for me. I make runs and move the ball on and if I'm near the goal I might do damage. Tommy Carr doesn't give us strict instructions on how to play. I can move about, go looking for it, feed off Robbo. I've got to provide the variety."
After the drawn Laois game, where a brave and perceptive pass from him set up Robertson for the equalising point, the Dubs sat down for a post-mortem. They watched the video through, then watched it with Marty Morrissey's commentary anticipating the shock of the season and then watched it again with crowd sounds only, same sense of anticipation. It was a sobering session but there was a vein of giddiness too. They had survived, they had this galvanising experience in the bank, perhaps they were on their way.
"We're a young team. It's a lot different to 1995. I came in and I would have been in some awe. The guys had all been around, they knew how to prepare for a Leinster final, they knew when things got serious etc. This team is learning. Everyone is equal. Meetings aren't about Dessie Farrell talking for half an hour. Everyone says what they think. That's been exciting."
For Sherlock himself whatever happens tomorrow is unlikely to ignite the warehouse full of fireworks which went off in the public imagination four years ago. He'll be one of the workers.
There's little glamour left in it. He looks forward to the football, the sound of Croke Park alive, another in the ration of big days which fill out a career. He's wary too, though. Last week his TV work took him to New Zealand, a trip he'd rather have avoided but couldn't. Word of his travels reached a Sunday paper and when he arrived back he braced himself, despite being present and correct for training on the Monday.
"With anyone else it would be a work commitment. These things happen. I know if I play badly though it will be written that I was off on some skite. It will be ammunition. That preparation wasn't right, why was he picked, all that kind of thing."
People have got used to him, the profile, the legacy of that crazy summer. The TV job scarcely causes any comment. He played Sligo last year and he got a knock on his leg and hit the ground roaring. He thought it was broken. And as he was lying there he heard a Sligo player whom he never identified saying: "I saw you on that thing you did about snooker on the tele. Very good. I was watching that." Had to laugh.
These summer days, whenever he's free he travels around the GAA summer camps. Wanders in and sits down and talks to the kids. They'll ask him about the Dubs, he'll ask them what they think, they chit chat back and forth and when the kids are going or even before then he'll hear one of them quietly ask another "what's his name, who's he?"
Life goes on.
