One More Day

Talk about a dream

Try to make it real

You wake up in the night

With a fear so real

You spend your life waiting

For a moment that just don’t come

Well, don’t waste your time waiting

Badlands, Bruce Springsteen

Shane Kingston wasn’t going to waste his time waiting when he started off on his gallop, with ninety seconds to try and make real the dreams of thousands, ninety seconds to create a moment that, for much of his career and for the lives of so many Cork supporters, just hadn’t come. And then, in ninety seconds, from the Badlands rose the Glory Days. Ba-da-da-da, Ba-da-da-da

And to think that some eejit with a Cork hurling blog wrote last week that there was no logical argument to be made in favour of a Cork victory. Some ignorant hack that seemed to think that the Munster Hurling Championship bowed to logic, that ten thousand moving parts oiled by emotion and history could somehow be constrained by the banality of form books, statistics and any of the other numbers that swirl around outside the white lines. Sometimes, the game is just the game and when in the mood, it tends to make fools out of us all.

Talk to the man on the street before the game and tell him that Cork would win in a shoot-out and he might look at you sideways, almost half apologetically. Tell him that Cork would win by lamping ball down on top of the Limerick half-back line and targeting the 2022 Hurler of the Year and he’d less apologetically tell you where to go. But that’s exactly what Cork did. They went down the belly of the beast, they hammered the hammer, they fought fire with fire and whatever other idiom you’re having yourself. They won it and lost it and won it again and there’s 40,000 witnesses who can attest to veracity of Denis Walsh’s post-match assertion that you can “forget everything you heard about great games in the past…a better hurling game than this is unimaginable.”

The febrile atmosphere that swamped Páirc Uí Chaoimh last Saturday from the throw-in was like nothing seen before and the noise only ratcheted up as Cork proceeded to tear into the All-Ireland champions, finding holes that nobody knew existed, winning battles that nobody thought winnable. As the volume crescendoed, so did the tension, the fear of reprisal and the hope that maybe, just maybe, it was on. That Limerick might be toppled, that Cork might come out of this with something more than just another valiant, excruciating defeat. At half time, the ground surged and shook with possibility and by the time Kingston was dragged to the ground and Sean Stack stretched out his arms, thousands became completely and utterly lost in the manic intoxication of it all.

Hoggy had barely been involved up to this point, but he could have just rolled off the couch for all we cared. It hadn’t been a day for his usual sleight of hand and two card tricks; this show didn’t allow for such refined parlour acts. For once, he’d been at the periphery of the magic, a mere player in the illusion, where for seventy minutes the disbelieving crowd remained transfixed as the seemingly impossible slowly unfolded before their eyes. But there was only ever going to be one man to play out the final act, to bury the ball past Quaid, to bring the trembling masses to their knees and to bring the whole mystical pageant to the teetering brink of escapology. Brian Hayes provided the encore and it became exactly that. We’d escaped, we’d survived, we’d lived to our outermost limits.

It might mean nothing, of course, if viewed through the most clinical and unemotional of lenses. Cork could lose on Sunday and that’s that. Christ, Cork could win on Sunday and it might still be all she wrote. But to say that what transpired last weekend and the meaning afforded to it lives and dies with the outcome of the next seventy minutes of championship chaos would be to lose sight of all the other things, the bits off screen, the glorious appendages that come with supporting any team.

What it means is that we’ve one more week. One more week talking about Sunday, humming and hawing over tickets and trains, the kind of discourse we thought would have to be put back in the box for another year. What it means is that we’ve one more day. One more day and a trip to the home of hurling and a visit to Larry’s pub just off the square to sink pints and sing songs with the rest of them. What it means is that we’ve one more game. One more game and seventy more minutes to become so readily captive to the pure, unadulterated madness that comes with following this hurling team. Whatever way the cards may fall on Sunday, that’s what the victory over Limerick ultimately meant.

In his autobiography, Bruce Springsteen remarked that people go to his concerts “not to learn something, but to be reminded of something”. Last Saturday evening, as the sun began to set and the Boss’s anthemic ode to nostalgia bellowed down onto the heaving phalanx of red below, we were reminded of why we go through all the bad days. We were reminded of what it’s like to win. And above all else, we were reminded of what it’s like to be part of something truly and ineffably special.

Up the Rebels.