All-Ireland SHC Final: The Kilkenny hurling panel. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Nowhere else, literally nowhere else, is a player's minutest fault so subject to scrutiny.

Players who would make championship sides in just about any other county are routinely discarded in Kilkenny. Lack of aggression. Lack of speed. Lack of reliability.

The evolution of the side over the years in which Brian Cody has been in charge has been remarkable. Every year Cody has made a point out of freshening his first 15, and in the bleak times after disasters he hasn't been afraid to overhaul things radically.

This summer brought defeat to Wexford. Soon there was smoke coming from the revisited drawing board. Michael Kavanagh was ditched. John Hoyne and Seán Dowling went. All three had All-Ireland medals to look at while on the bench. None of them had ever been given guarantees when they won those medals. It's a tough world.

It's a set-up without sentiment and devoted, like an enclosed order, to the service of one goal: Kilkenny's success.

There are the high-profile cases, of course. Charlie Carter and Philly Larkin both began getting splinters on the bench while they were reigning All Stars.

Pat O'Neill was the centre half back of the late 1990s. He vanished one spring. Eamonn Kennedy succeeded him. Two years later he joined the ranks of the disappeared.

Many are called. Few are chosen. In Cody's first year in charge, 1999, Kilkenny lost their second All-Ireland on the trot. The following spring Aidan Cummins, John O'Neill, Noel Hickey, JP Corcoran, Kevin Power, Michael Gordon and Eddie Brennan were drafted in for the National League. Only two lasted the distance but the average age of the squad dropped to 24 and Cody wasn't done looking.

In 2001, Galway famously horsed Kilkenny out of Croke Park. When Kilkenny began their next league campaign JJ Delaney, Richie Mullally, Martin Comerford, Derek Lyng and Pat Tennyson were on board.

That's not untypical. The team that finished the championship in 2000 had three new faces from 1999. In 2001 just two new faces on the team that lost to Galway. The following year five were gone and five were in. Cody kept up the rotation.

Four new faces in last year's All-Ireland final side.

You could make quite a team from those who have lost out having tasted the big time. Pat O'Neill, Ken O'Shea, Canice Brennan, Willie O'Connor, Denis Byrne, Eamonn Kennedy, Brian McEvoy, Stephen Grehan, Charlie Carter, John Power, Philly Larkin, Richie Mullaly, Andy Comerford, Jimmy Coogan. All players with All-Ireland final experience who faded away.

Some went quietly. Some were too tired, too injured, too distracted for more. Others went out with a bang. Carter was a Kilkenny obsession. DJ's shadow. A man who fed well in the open spaces. Post 2001 they began to doubt him. Charlie got on as a substitute in the 2002 final. Was gone in a blaze of controversy in early summer the next year. He was captain at the time. McEvoy went too. No bit parts accepted.

Then there have been the postulants. Those who got within touching distance and saw it taken away again. Cummins has an All-Ireland under-21 medal and experience (naturally) at WIT. He had a fine league in 2001. He started the championship against Dublin early in the summer of 2003. He was replaced that day by Walter Burke. Neither have played championship since.

There were fleeting appearances, too, for Cummins' WIT colleagues Alan Geoghegan and Brian Dowling. Sometimes your time comes.

Occasionally someone else's time comes while you are queuing.

Take Tennyson. When he started the Leinster semi-final of 2002 or when he squeezed into the starting 15 this summer he must have thought his time had come. Ken Coogan has overtaken him on the blindside.

So it goes. Kilkenny get younger as they get better. The starting 15 look at the bench. The bench looks at the underage set-up. Richie Power. Richie Hogan. Donncha Cody and others boiling up underneath, fired with ambition and not too tired, too weak or too injured to face into another year.

That has been the miracle of Cody's evolutionary process. Kilkenny have never grown into their slippers. Any time they have gotten comfortable they have been jostled out of it.

Youth and hunger are always on tap and Cody always has his finger on the primer.