Sport Book extract: The Christmas opera is traditionally the giddiest time of the year at St Jarlath's College. Football does not really heat up until February and the show breaks up the forlorn winter months; it carries the students and staff through the ever-darkening afternoons that announce the autumn term and seem to linger until the New Year.

St Jarlath's is situated smack in the middle of Tuam town, tucked away under the shadow of the cathedral and located, in a touch of delicious cruelty, within a stone's throw of the girl's Mercy Convent.

A high and heartless wall separates both scholarly universes and, in the decades past, the boys used to gaze across it longingly, like East Berliners. The grounds of the college, with its elm trees and football pitches, its scuffed basketball court and trimmed grass, its stained glass and the simple, potent plaque above the arched wooden door all communicate an ancient feeling that in Jarlath's the outside does not matter. It ticks to its own calendar time. During autumn term, the sky over east Galway is chilled and black when the president, Conal Eustace, Jarlath's class of '62, unlocks the arched entrance of the 'new college' at seven-thirty every morning, and it has turned sullen silver by the end of senior football practice in the evening.

The opera, a sixty-year tradition, is the school's colourful and boisterous response to the dimness of the Irish winter. It means painting and singing and an opportunity for a bit of organised chaos, a chance to filch a smoke or carry props around the college. And it also means weeks of evening practice with the Mercy girls, with whom the show has been performed since 1969 - Irish Catholicism's belated nod to the summer of love. Back in Conal's day - Brigadoon was his first opera - the senior boys, often the school football stars, played the main roles while the youngsters with unbroken vocal cords were prevailed upon to don the rouge and heels and mimic the damsels.

'You would end up in make-up, dancing with boys that you regarded as heroes,' he laughs. 'It really doesn't bear thinking about any more.' Conal is sprightly and energetic and always in fine, warm humour. Although he is school president, he is also taking the Senior A football team for the year. It will be Conal's fate or privilege to preside over the end of boarding at St Jarlath's - the closing of a way of life that had a permanent impact on the thousands of boys whose teenage years were shaped by the whims and rules and glories of the place.

St Jarlath's is primarily an educational stronghold, a beacon for families across Connacht with a particularly strong affinity with Mayo. For that reason, among others, it was never fully embraced in Tuam as the town school; that distinction went to the Christian Brothers' school, St Patrick's. Jarlath's has a more complicated relationship with local people for, although regarded as a separate entity, it has heaped honour on Tuam. For Jarlath's is, of course, nationally famous as a Gaelic football academy - the school is the untouchable master of the Hogan Cup with twelve victories to date.

A couple of years ago, the final class of first-year boarding pupils was accepted and in just two years' time, the school will be emptied of night students for the first time in 200 years. Jarlath's is to be amalgamated with St Patrick's and will educate 'day' boys only.

Boarding schools lend themselves to certain associations. For those of us who have never been, they are a half-imagined world of grubby-fisted posh kids in expensive blazers, they have a tuck shop and cloisters, a haunted room or two and packages from home filled with confectionery delights. Headmasters with freaky black gowns sweep along rooms; there is a common room, origin of endless tricks and adventures and wheezes, midnight feasts, maybe even a Mam'zelle and somewhere, a blinking bespectacled fat kid. They are the stuff of Frank Richards and Enid Blyton, in other words, children's fiction that was lapped up in this country in the 1960s and 1970s.

St Jarlath's, of course, is nothing like that. It is prosaic and sensible and traditionally tough. Jarlath's is country. There is no uniform here for a start and it is always a surprise to see photographs of the disastrous teenage fashions of the day as modelled by well-known football men like Pat Holmes or Brian Talty.

Yet the principal theory is the same. Boys eat, sleep, learn, fight loneliness and each other; they play football, obsess about Mercy girls, yearn for home, sit exams and, if they are lucky, they laugh a lot under the same roof. And the staff members here become, after a few years, governed by the very lifestyle they supervise - men like Conal and Charlie Kelly, a dean in the boarding school, and Fr Oliver Hughes, the past president and the man associated with all of Jarlath's great modern football teams.

The college was founded at the start of the nineteenth century on the pragmatism of Archbishop Oliver Kelly who rented what was Ffrench's Bank, a financial company ruined by the end of the Napoleonic War. Lord Ffrench committed suicide and it was left to his sister to tidy up his affairs. Renting to the Church was a convenient form of income and once the archbishop had established a formal school there, the Ffrench family later invited purchase of the building. That marked the beginning of what would become a handsome estate, with the 'new college' completed in 1859. Land was acquired for a college farm to provide milk and butter, a vacuum cleaner from Electrolux was purchased in 1903 and, oh luxury of luxuries, an indoor swimming pool was added in the 1930s.

There are also several town houses, front facing onto Bishop Street and backing into the rear of the college grounds. In these houses the Jarlath's priests now live and, shoving open an unlocked back door, Conal excused himself, pausing to show the wretched state in which his pet cat has left the wallpaper next to the stairs.

The staff room is the epicentre of the world for the Jarlath's teachers. It is there that the house teachers like Fr Fintan Monahan and Fr Seán Cunningham and Fr Brendan Kilcoyne gather for lunch - soup followed by a meat dish and vegetables and perhaps a trifle for dessert. Rotating duties often mean you never know who will be in the staff room at any given hour. Because many kids clear home at the weekends and because they have money in their pockets, food is not the issue it used to be at the college.

For many students who passed through the school in the era of an unbending disciplinary regime, food became the abiding memory of the college. As is the case today, students sat eight at a table and there was an appointed monitor to supervise the division of the tray of food. Generally it was accepted that the further away you sat from the monitor, the stingier your portions were.

Occasionally, things got desperate. During the white winter of 1947, when the country was ravaged by relentless snowfalls, most of the school fell ill with influenza. Pupils of the period recall the kitchens serving up fried sausages and eggs and bacon three and four days a week in an effort to revive spirits and health - a display of generosity that for Jarlath's bordered on the ostentatious. One hundred years before that, the catering situation was even more grim, with famine-relief supplies regularly pillaged before they made it as far as Tuam from Galway City.

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The shrill bell rang and, from the timber floors overhead and along the polished stone floors of the corridor and from the tarmac outside, came the sound of hundreds and hundreds of footsteps, like thunder clapping.

The opera is performed annually the weekend before Christmas. On the Saturday night of the Joseph and his Amazing technicolour Dreamcoat production, St Jarlath's Hall drew a capacity crowd. This weekend has more or less evolved into an unofficial open evening for the parents of students.Oliver Hughes, a former student, teacher and president of Jarlath's for thirty-one years, is back on the old sod this evening to see the musical. To him, it is a treat to be anticipated as much as a Hogan Cup match.

'You'll be surprised. It is more like a professional production than a school show,' he promised after we were escorted to seats at the rear of the hall.

And he wasn't far wrong. Some of the leads were terrific and the show tunes were instantly recognisable. But it was unmistakably a typically Irish school production that was set in a classic Irish parish hall. The hall had that dense, perfumed warmth of bingo although outside it was a beautiful, seasonal night of clean frost.

One of the kids, Dónal Ó Healaí, played the Pharaoh and the idea was to do a caricature of Elvis Presley. He arrived on stage in a lavish all-white suit and quiff. This was not a role that called for half measures. If it was method acting, then the method involved ditching all semblance of cool. He gave this marvellous pastiche of The King, Brendan Bowyer and a Greek god and he brought the house down.

'I never did anything like this before,' he confessed afterwards. 'Like, I try to sing a bit all right in a band we have back home but God, never the whole make-up and costume thing. I dunno, it's a bit of craic. Gives you confidence, like. I knew I wanted to give the opera a go anyhow whenever I came to Jarlath's.'

Dónal is from Spiddal and switched to the school after the junior cert. A chance meeting with his friend Fiachra Breathnach convinced him that he wanted to leave his mixed day school at home and go boarding. Fiachra plays football and last year he played half-forward on the Jarlath's team that lost the Hogan Cup final to St Patrick's, Maghera.

'And Fiachra just said to me, come here. It's a different world. And I could see straight away what the place had done for him. Fiachra and myself would be quite similar and I was just struck by his attitude to things.'

He has a lot going for him, Dónal - bright and outgoing and athletic. By chance, he was the only cast member on the Senior A football team. Rehearsals forced him to skip several early-season training sessions and already he was dreading the thought of catching up during the unforgiving January sessions of which he had heard many horror stories.

'And the one thing I would say, you know, is that it has completely changed my attitude to priests. They were always people that I just never even considered talking to. I wouldn't have even known how. Like, that's nothing against the priests at home, they all seem like sound men. But here, I mean, you are listened to and you get respect for saying what you have to say. And it's nothing to do with religion or anything like that. That's left up to yourself. There is a morning mass on at half past seven in the morning and you might get a dozen at it. I have gone myself sometimes, and before coming here, I wouldn't have ever seen that hour on the clock. But no, like, some of the people here are the loveliest I have met.'

For Oliver Hughes, attending St Jarlath's was always an assumed thing. His father Tommy passed through there in the 1920s and several of his grand-uncles went on for the priesthood in Maynooth. Oliver spent his boyhood on a 200-acre Galway farm that was reasonably prosperous and family-orientated and happy. The eldest of a large clan, he worked hard and roamed freely and is still stunned by how coldly and completely his entrance to Jarlath's in the autumn of 1957 closed the door on that boyhood. Those first weeks of bells, waking him and shunting him here and instructing him to eat now and pray now and go outside now drove him to the edge.

'I found it an extremely difficult experience,' he remembers almost half a century later from the parish house in Corofin, where he was recently posted after a working life in the college.

'I think it was a school of its time. What I found difficult was the enormity of the place and how impersonal it was. You wondered then if anybody was interested in you. The whole way of life was harsh - the culture of the day was of fear and repression. It was all rules and regulations. The priests and the guards - and that percolated through to school life.'

He played on the Hogan Cup winning team of 1961, the only season that the college retained the title. Football was both a way of creating a presence for oneself and a way of forgetting; it burnt up the long evenings and helped break the repetition of the boarding regime.

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In 1929, Canon Joseph Walsh entered the college in the newly established Connacht Colleges' competition, and the task of training the football team was given to Fr Michael Malone. Thus began the college's first golden era; the Jarlath's housekeeper polished the Connacht Cup from 1932 right through until 1940.

The first ever All-Ireland Colleges was held in 1946 and Jarlath's were the omnipotent champions of Connacht. Although they lost that year's final to St Patrick's of Armagh, beaten 3-11 to 4-7, they became champions of Ireland in 1947, the bitterest winter of the century. There was a sense of manifest destiny, with Seán Purcell, born in the shadow of the college on Bishop Street, displaying the nascent genius that would flare so memorably over Galway's brightest-ever footballing era.

That team, captained by Vincent McHale, took revenge on Armagh in Croke Park on Sunday, 11 May. The final score was 4-10 to 3-8. The match was broadcast live on radio and, back in the school, the Jarlath's boys gathered and lived every moment through the crackling, glamorous broadcast. The following night, a Monday evening, bonfires were fired on the edge of Tuam Town, and the Boys' Band trumpeted the heroes into the square where town commissioners waited in all their pomp and glittering chains. At the gates of the college waited Archbishop Joseph Walsh and the staff and hundreds of Jarlath's boys crowding the yard, standing on heights, awe-struck faces pressed against the upper window panes for a better view. St Jarlath's had its first night of glory and thereafter the chase would be permanent. Although the All-Ireland series was abandoned after 1948 because the Catholic hierarchy feared its powers to seduce students from study, football lost no stature in Jarlath's, and when the national competition was revived a decade later, Fr Brendan Kavanagh was in place as the games master of the college. He was as thorough and ambitious as Malone twenty years earlier and, suddenly, the All-Ireland titles began to roll in: 1960, 1961, 1964 and 1966, with lost finals in both 1962 and 1967. It was in this environment that Oliver Hughes found his way.

Oliver insists that despite making two Hogan Cup teams, the big games made him nervous. The pressure on St Jarlath's teams to deliver was implicit but nonetheless deeply apparent. Football was the instrument through which the college communicated its substance to the greater world. Academics were taken as seriously, but examination results were an individual matter between the student and his teachers. Football was about a glorious collective identity.

Forty years on, he has clear recall of some of the big games but not many. He admits that in his senior year being on the first team gave him a quasi-celebrity status in the college among the younger kids. But you believe him when he says none of that mattered, not even the winning. Perhaps he is a chip off the old block in that way. What Oliver valued most when he finally left St Jarlath's one gorgeous May morning with aspirations to join the missionaries was the recollection of the pure and countless evenings when his hands were red raw with cold and it was getting too dark to see the ball properly. When they were playing for the joy of playing. Those were the times that got him by and he remembered that when, out of the blue, chance and the Church returned him to St Jarlath's seven years after he thought he had walked out of its gates for the final time.

Conal Eustace tells this story against himself. It was some weeks before the 1982 Hogan Cup semi-final in which St Jarlath's were pittedagainst their eternal rivals, St Mel's of Longford. Conal was taking charge of the college hurlers that season, a team fated to persevere along a noble if anonymous route while the football team shone. It so happened that the senior football captain, Rory O'Dwyer from Urhan in west Cork, was also one of the best hurlers in the college. In the last minute of a contest that Conal cannot even remember the relevance of, O'Dwyer was sent off.

The referee happened to be a good friend of Conal's and as they were all leaving the field he joked, 'I hope that wasn't one of your footballers I sent off.' Conal, pale at this stage, informed him that he had just redcarded the Jarlath's senior captain. The man almost choked on his whistle. The dismissal, coming practically on the eve of the All-Ireland semi-final, would rule O'Dwyer out of the St Mel's match and Conal drove home wondering how best to present the bad news in the staff-room.

While the hurling team were on their adventures, however, separate legislative problems had arisen. On St Patrick's Day, Jarlath's had defeated St Colman's of Claremorris in the provincial final on a score of 1-9 to 2-5. It emerged that a St Jarlath's player named Michael Molloy, who had shortly before enrolled as a senior student, had actually played for another school prior to his arrival. He was therefore quite possibly ineligible and St Colman's, devastated by the narrowness of their defeat, pressed for a ruling on the incident. The Jarlath's fraternity was in shock and poor Molloy inconsolable. The case went from a tangle of provincial meetings to a late night session at Croke Park.

'It was just crazy,' recalls Conal. 'I remember clearly the night we were all waiting for word to come down from Dublin. And the phone was hopping with newspaper people wondering what was going on. Eventually I think we just left a taped message.'

Ultimately, it was ruled that St Jarlath's had not been guilty of anything and, inevitably, they not only beat St Mel's but won the final against Skibbereen after a replay. Shortly afterwards, Eugene McGee, the talismanic Longford journalist and football authority for whom 1982 would distinguish itself as quite a year, wrote an article that hinted at conspiracy. His theory was that the St Colman's protest was just a ruse to delay the semi-final by a few weeks, thereby ensuring that Rory O'Dwyer, Jarlath's most influential player, would be clear to play.

'And it was a grand theory,' says Conal with a smile, 'but one of the most outlandish I have ever heard. Because the idea of St Colman's actually trying to do St Jarlath's a favour in football is beyond the beyond. If you understood the bitterness that divided both schools over the years, there is just no way they would plot to aid one another. But I think they felt differently in Longford.'

Leslie McGettigan, at the age of fifteen, was the youngest player to feature in a Hogan Cup final and one of the few boys in the history of the competition to feature in three successive finals. Nearly twenty years later, McGettigan remembers this time as 'the happiest three years of my life'. He had entered St Jarlath's through a family connection. His brother Paul married a sister of Jimmy Duggan's, the celebrated Galway football player and Jarlath's alumnus. When Leslie crashed disastrously in the Inter Certificate, his parents thought boarding school was his only hope of salvation.

'I was kind of surprised just how quickly I came to love the place,' he recalled. 'I think I was fortunate to attend there at a time when the staff were just terrific. Like, I would have regarded Fr Oliver as a friend. He was my French teacher and when I arrived I would have been way behind and he just had this way of encouraging and helping me catch up without really making a big deal of it. And then on the football field he was just a brilliant trainer.

"Obviously the whole week revolved around the football and I loved that. On a Wednesday, you had a half-day and on the notice board was posted the "A" team and the "B" team for the week. That was how you found out how you were progressing. And you could not get the dinner inside you fast enough so you could go and see if you had made the "A" team.'

No school has ever won three Hogan Cups in a row. McGettigan's generation came closest. The team of 1982 was a gifted one but in 1983 St Jarlath's produced a truly mesmerising team that somehow got caught by three goals against Coláiste Chríost Rí in the final in Croke Park. Nothing was expected of the 1984 team. Only McGettigan and Mark Butler had returned from the previous year.

They beat St Patrick's, Maghera - a team that included Henry Downey, the future Derry All-Ireland winning captain - by 0-10 to 2-3. McGettigan pitched in four points. After the homecoming, the school organised a disco and invited pupils from the other town schools to come along.

A brother of Pat Holmes, the future Mayo player and manager, drove down for the party. McGettigan is not quite sure how, but before the night was through, about four of them ended up in Tingles nightclub in Ballina. They awoke on Holmes's brother's floor the following midday and concluded they were going to be murdered once they got back to the school so they hung around the town for the day.

Around dusk, between evening meal and study, they stole back into the college and presented themselves in the dormitories for roll call. To their amazement, nothing was said. Three weeks later, term over, they exited St Jarlath's and were free to spend all the nights they wanted in Ballina. Gradually, the team lost touch. The photograph is their epitaph, the shrine that distinguishes them from so many other promising football teams that passed through the college. Connacht titles or Hogan Cup final appearances do not cut it. Only the national winners go through the ceremony of posing together in the grounds, exemplars of a tradition.

No man features in the photographs as often as Oliver Hughes does.

His appearance has altered little through the decades, a neat athletic figure with a tidy hair parting and a reluctant smile. He took charge of the football team in the late 1970s and then passed control to Joe Long, who delivered a Hogan Cup in 1994. Thirteen of that team would advance to the Galway panel that won the All-Ireland senior football championship four years later. Oliver returned to St Jarlath's after spending his time as a seminarian in Maynooth, an experience that still makes him shudder.

'It was an extension in practice and ethos of St Jarlath's with all the old coldness reinforced,' he said. 'It was a brutally impersonal place. You were not bidden the time of day.' After a brief spell as a curate out in the majestic wilds of Leenane, he was summoned back to his alma mater at the age of twenty-six.

Football was a six- and seven-day a week preoccupation during that time. Each evening, Oliver conducted training out on the main field, raced in for a shower and then began driving the 'day' pupils home on epic jaunts across the back roads in the Galway countryside. Several priests would make the runs.

Even then, cars were relatively precious commodities in many rural households and if the boys wanted to play football, they needed a lift home.

'They were simply enormously fulfilling days. I never resented the hours involved, never felt taken for granted. I just enjoyed the whole spirit of being responsible for these teams.'

And yet there was a time when he questioned the worth or meaning of his choice - never his vocation but the philosophy he tried to bring to his everyday work with children. Countless times in recent years, Oliver Hughes has read articles and watched discussions on RTÉ in which the Church, the entity to which he devoted his life, was reduced to nothing but a frothing beast in a white collar that had scandalised and terrorised the country. When story after story of physical and sexual abuse came pouring out over the national airwaves, crimes perpetrated by men who wore the same collar as he, certainly he felt confused and vulnerable. When he spoke with friends, they couldn't understand why the archbishops weren't moving swiftly to address a problem that clearly ran deeply. He couldn't understand why nothing was done. It was a tough time to be a priest, but at least in St Jarlath's they felt removed because they looked around them and saw that they ran a happy house.

Then one morning a phone call came from a solicitor to announce that a student who had attended the school in the 1980s had filed a case against the college chaplain of that period. By the afternoon, the television cameras were at the gates. 'We were sick and devastated. We just presumed that this would close the school.'

The case went to court and the chaplain pleaded guilty and, for a long time, Oliver Hughes did not feel comfortable enough to walk through Tuam wearing his collar. It did not matter that these were the same streets through which he had led All- Ireland winning teams on so many fine May evenings. All had been poisoned.

'People would have found it impossible to understand how we could have worked with this man and not have suspected. But it never even entered my mind. I mean, priests in particular are so bloody innocent or naïve when it comes to things like that - it would have just been completely inconceivable and alien to me that someone I knew could do anything harmful to a child. And this was the chaplain, the most trusted position in the school, someone I saw as better than me.'

The saving grace, though, was that throughout that sleepless term in 1995, the students still looked him in the eye.

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Seán Purcell was like a God in Tuam. He still is. Today, Purcell lives on Bishop Street. He is one of the most decorated footballer players to have played the game and was voted, along with fellow Galway man Enda Colleran, onto the Team of the Millennium.

What Purcell remembers most clearly about St Jarlath's first ever Hogan Cup is the cold.

'The snowfall that year began in February and lasted right through until May. I never experienced anything like it since. There was no green to be seen for months, the landscape was entirely changed. It must have been six feet high in places in the town where it drifted against walls. All the bushes and the shrubs were killed and you were just constantly cold.'

The weather, however, did nothing to disrupt the training pattern devised by Fr Michael 'the Doc' Mooney. They trained on the frozen, snow-covered field, learning to run and solo the ball with the snow numbing their ankles and soaking their socks and leaving the ball wet and heavy. Scoring a goal was impossible because the velocity of a low strike died in the snow. The boys resorted to wearing gloves and long johns during the months of March and April when it was still truly bitter out. Purcell was the only 'day boy' on the 1947 team and he used to shudder with relief when he departed for the relative comforts of home while his team-mates traipsed inside for another evening of lamentable food and icy dormitories.

Having been beaten by St Patrick's, Armagh, in the inaugural Hogan Cup final - the great Iggy Jones scored a record 3-4 that day - St Jarlath's were desperate for atonement the following season. That was one of the reasons why no allowance was made for the weather. Jones had left the Ulster college when the teams met in Croke Park on Sunday, 11 May. Purcell travelled with his team-mates in cars driven by the priests, and the team stayed in a hotel near Croke Park the night before the game. At that time, the students did not travel but were permitted to listen to a live broadcast of the game in the main hall in the college.

The lack of goal practice did not impede upon the St Jarlath's team as they won a terrific game by 4-10 to 3-8. Purcell landed three late frees to finish what had been a ceaseless challenge from St Patrick's.

Purcell did not see many of his 1947 classmates after he left the college. 'There was a culture then that when you got to fourteen, you left school and caught what was known as the ten past three - the train for Holyhead. The priorities and expectations we had of life were very different then. It was grim. I think I had it easy in comparison to the lads that were boarding. They spent a lot of that year hungry and cold and I heard stories that made me glad I was not inside the place at night-time.'

There was to be no Hogan Cup for St Jarlath's College this year. The Senior A team were defeated by St Mary's in the Connacht semi-final. Nobody had any complaints. In late May, the school's first-year team played their final in Corofin, also against St Mary's, coached by the great Galway wingback, Sean Óg De Paor. St Jarlath's were ferociously strong and inside the first twenty minutes rattled home four goals against the city team. Before long, the score ceased to matter and the boys just played for the sake of playing. It was a bright day, one of those intensely summer lunchtimes that seem to precede the examination season, and teachers like Ray Silke, Galway's All- Ireland winning captain of 1998, and Tommy Davin stood on the grassy bank in shirt sleeves watching the match. Afterwards, the young St Jarlath's fans stormed the pitch, flags and banners raised as in the days of old. Conal presented the cup to the boys and posed for photographs. Hopes are high for this gang of boys. It is believed they can bring the thirteenth Hogan Cup title to Tuam.