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IT’S June 21, the Longest Day in Dublin city.
I’m standing on Hill 16 next to our household’s newly minted veteran of the Leaving Cert.
For him, and his Class of 2025, it is ‘D-Day Plus One’ in the great campaign that starts once school is out forever.
But there is nothing to suggest that in little over an hour, we will both remember this sun splashed Saturday as one of our own “Day of Days.”
We are both watching as Dublin hurling captain Chris Crummey trudges from the Croke Park pitch with red flashing in his eyes.
The famous words of D-Day and Band of Brothers legend, Captain Dick Winters, drift into my mind on the Clonliffe Road breeze: “We’re paratroopers we’re supposed to be surrounded.”
Winters was describing the regular fate of his Easy Company troops as they dug into foxholes in the Belgian town of Bastogne to fight the Battle of The Bulge.
They were cut off behind enemy lines with no reinforcements, not enough ammunition and dressed in the wrong clothes for winter in northern Europe.
Yet 29 days later they would be christened the ‘Battered Bastards of Bastogne’ by newspapers after defying impossible odds.
Back in Croke Park even those odds look a little mean.
The Dubs are down to 14 with an hour to play against Limerick, probably the greatest team the game has ever seen. A familiar tale is unspooling: ‘We’re Dublin hurlers, we’re meant to be surrounded’.
And then…
There are those that dismiss the joining of dots from sport to the great themes of life as “mythologised guff” and “hyperbolised nonsense.”
They would have it all reduced to GPS data analytics and performance metrics.
If that was still your philosophy around 5.30pm in Croke Park last Saturday, you probably needed to check yourself for a pulse.
Because here was a day made from the stuff that you can’t use to populate a spreadsheet.
The script that logic dictated was ripped apart. And instead we got Miracle on 34th Street meets Mission Impossible.
To borrow from Monty Python, we witnessed David taking down Goliath and his big brother – with one hand tied behind his back .
Hill 16 became a front row seat to watch the Christians devouring the lions in the coliseum.
It was General Custer reversing the result at Little Big Horn, Davy Crocket and a band of rag-ball rovers cowboys emerging victorious at the Alamo.
The Titanic taking a direct hit from an iceberg, and continuing on its way to New York while shaking a defiant fist at the starry North Atlantic night, shouting: “Is that all you’ve got?”
Hell, it might even have been as madly improbable as Mayo winning just once!
My first experience in Croke Park was watching a 14-man Dublin team beat Offaly in a famous Leinster final with Jimmy Keaveney on the sideline.
They wrote a song about it. In time they will write one about this too.
Sean Brennan saving from Aaron Gillane at point blank range – like a condemned man catching the firing squad’s bullet between his teeth
John Hetherton accomplishing a feat of trigonometry that would have NASA scientists scratching their pointy heads, as he located the near impossible coordinates to orbit a moonshot through the narrowest of angles on its way to dock with the stanchion of the Hill 16 net.
Cian O’Sullivan dispatching the killshot down the throat of the ravenous great white ‘Jaws’ as the stricken Dublin vessel looked surely, finally about to slip beneath the waves into the shark infested water.
And a half empty Hill 16 shaking like it was September 18th, 2011, all over. High on the mad improbability of it all.
Later, as we exited underneath the old railway end terrace, there came one of those spontaneous thunderbursts of sound that take on a uniquely intense quality when trapped inside the concrete husk of a great sporting arena, one that has just witnessed something the walls themselves can scarcely believe.
Rolling deafening peals. “Come On You Boys in Blue.”
So often these are the moments that fuse bonds between strangers.
And across the generation divide too.
I first got the small ball bug working on a paper in Offaly in a previous life, in the time of Whelehan, Dooley and Pilkington.
But it has been following the exploits of that next generation that has deepened a love and appreciation for the old game.
As we float together from the ground I’m smiling at the memory of once offering that same Leaving Cert veteran walking beside me a plagiarised nugget of wisdom.
It was intended to be used if asked to offer any thoughts in a dressing room meeting when his childhood band of brothers were facing their own small brush with seemingly insurmountable odds.
As it turned out it was the exact punchline their coach and mentor had in his mind – himself a man who has done more than most to push this boulder of Dublin hurling up the mountain.
The original copyright belongs to that other believer in the improbable, Nelson Mandela:
“It is always impossible. Until it is done.”
This week as the Class of 2025 mark their rite of passage from those childish dressing rooms, they couldn’t take a better code into the perilous world we have made for them.
And they will probably never see it lived so well as on an impossibly crazy afternoon of hurling on the longest day in Dublin city.
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