.
This is our time.
SO how are you this morning?
I’ve woken up with a constrictor knot in my stomach that won’t unravel until around 5pm this afternoon.
Whether it’s replaced by joy and relief, or despair, is irrelevant. It matters that ‘the knot’ is there.
I am, after all, from Kerry.
Don’t worry, this article isn’t going to be soundtracked by a wistful Stockton’s Wing instrumental playing in the background, while I talk about how ‘that’s the schecret of Kerry’, sitting in a currach off Skellig Michael smoking a pipe.
No, my feelings about Kerry football, like yours, run deeper than cliché.
My first childhood memories are of weekends at my late ‘nana’s’ house in Ballymac, while mom and dad went on, what seemed like, their annual holiday to Dublin in the late 70s.
I was five, but I remember Mikey’s cheeky free and Bomber’s blitz in 1978. For the next four years, Kerry reigned and I honestly thought they never lost a game, until Seamus Darby caused serious confusion for a football mad nine-year-old.
My dad was on the Hill that terrible day and says his abiding memory is the sight of the water crashing down off the net as Darby’s shot made impact.
And so the love affair continued through the years – memorising Micheál O’Hehir’s commentary to the four-in-row-finals we had on video, pretending to be Mikey/Bomber/Spillane in the back garden with friends, etc – during the ‘famine’ and the second ‘Golden Age’ of the Noughties.
Like ‘the knot’, the Dublin rivalry has been ever present too in my psyche over the years. I’m too young to remember the pain of 1976 and 1977 (although I may have blocked out that pain as a 3/4 year old) and we had the better of them in the 80s and Noughties, but, of late, the tables have turned.
The knot is turning tighter now as I recall Cluxton and McManamon in 2011 and the late blitz in 2013.
But there’s something different about this year against the Blues. Barry O’Shea wrote on this website a few weeks ago about how he was with a Kerry team in times past, playing with such confidence they felt they could not lose.
Kerry look like that now.
Pundits can go on about the vulnerabilities down the middle against Cork and Tyrone and Dublin’s forward power, but you get the feeling the lads can handle anything thrown at them with a sense of composure, ready to settle the ship.
‘Don’t panic’ seems to be their mantra.
So, like thousands of other Kerry fans, I’ll walk down Jones’ Road this Sunday, thinking of past glories and looking forward to new ones, all the while with my friend ‘the knot’.
We are Kerry and we’re going to do it.
Actually, I do hear a bit of Stockton’s Wing in the background now…
