The last decade has marked the glory days of the Allianz Football League.
An antiquated and unsatisfying championship structure left people yearning for more competitive games between teams of equivalent standard, which the once unfashionable league provided week on week.
This went hand in hand with an elite breakaway in the sport, where the gap between All-Ireland contenders and even those in the middle tier became a chasm.
In the first year of Jack O'Connor's first term as Kerry manager in 2004, his team won a league and championship double but needed a replay to get past Limerick in the Munster final.
Last year, in the midst of achieving another double, they again faced Limerick, just promoted from Division 3, in the provincial decider. The gap this time was 23 points.
Ironically, the post-2008 league format may have played a large part in engendering this elite breakaway in the 2010s. After years/decades of tricking about with various convoluted Division 1A and Division 1B arrangements, pushing the reset button on the structure every couple of years, the GAA switched to the more intuitively conventional 'four-divisions-of-eight-based-on-performance' format in the late noughties.
As Kieran Shannon noted in the RTÉ GAA podcast last year, by hot-housing the best teams in an eight-team top tier, the "mid-cut talent" in the inter-county scene were cut adrift. Soon, the like of Wexford's run to the semi-final in 2008 would become a fantasy.
The corollary of this was that the league increased in gravitas. This year, however, we have a new championship programme, bulging at the seams with games.
The hurling league has been reduced to a series of rinky dink challenge matches, of minimal relevance to what transpires later in the year. Limerick won the league rather easily in 2019 before losing three of their six championship games later that summer. On recent evidence, they appear determined to ensure this never happens again.
The hurling league's issues also relate to the deliberate neutering of the format. But it does pose the question - what becomes of the league when the championship is also a league?
Will the jazzed up football championship format, with its round-robin element and increased demands, have the effect of robbing the league of its recently acquired lustre?
Even before this year, Division 1 was the one part of the league where the old shadow-boxing still pertained.
Tyrone's six-goal drubbing in Killarney in June 2021 has gone down in the misdirection hall of fame. After the All-Ireland final three months later, Feargal Logan insisted the loss had "stripped everyone bare" though in Kerry, where wariness of Tyrone machinations is deep-rooted, they refuse to believe it.
While it long ago became fashionable to declare the league the best competition in the GAA, it was also true to say that no one cared who won it. Anyone inclined to doubt it can ask back-to-back league winning manager Peter Keane how the review of his three-year term went down.
Division 1 has a strange look this year... there's something missing.
There are no beasts from the east on the prowl. Dublin's shocking inability to win football matches in the first half of last year's league saw them relegated to Division 2, despite a rally late in the campaign.
No, the top tier of Gaelic football this year can be dubbed the Pat 'the Cope' Gallagher division. Largely Connacht-Ulster. Plus Kerry.
Back in Micko and Heffo's heyday, the two provinces were only good for providing cannon fodder for Kerry and Dublin ahead of their inevitable All-Ireland final meeting. Now, they provide seven of the eight teams in Division 1.
The odd team out are the league and All-Ireland champions.
In Kerry, all the anxiety and grim-faced urgency of recent years has withered away, replaced by relaxed contentment. The 2022 All-Ireland victory will not go down as their most swaggering but, like 1997, it brought great release.
David Clifford has ascended to a plain of superstardom without precedent in the association. It's difficult these days to log onto social media and not encounter a freshly curated clip of his most dazzling moments.
The Fossa great spent the winter being pursued by hordes of pint-sized autograph hunters, like a pack of screaming teenage girls in Hard Day's Night. Even Buff Egan would be left standing on his own if Clifford wandered into view.
Clifford was created as the answer to the question 'what if Colm Cooper was able to throw Francie Bellew off him?' He is now widely regarded as the most complete forward in the history of the game.
The consensus emerging from press calls is that opposing managers are earmarking three points from play by Clifford as a best-case scenario.
Across his many stints as Kerry manager, Jack O'Connor's long-standing habit is go bull-headed for every trophy on offer in the first year.
Given the Cliffords' exertions over the course of the winter, might he be inclined to give them a rest and wind it back a bit for this spring?
Lee Keegan's retirement and Oisín Mullin's eventual move to Australia - coming on top of an overall flat performance last season - has encouraged the narrative that Mayo are bound for a period in transition, if not in full-blown wilderness. But their neighbours and rivals are understandably wary.
One of the most salient features of Mayo's modern football history, aside from the obvious, is their remarkable consistency. We were supposed to have seen the back of them for a while after the 2019 All-Ireland semi-final and yet there they were in the final again two years running, in '20 and '21, dethroning the Dubs en route to the latter.
The county, with its fevered Gaelic football culture, continually produces inter-county calibre players, albeit, arguably an excessive amount of athletic half backs and not enough inside forwards. Just when one crop tips into retirement, another emerges. Bob Touhy and Sam Callinan, both touted by local journalist Mike Finnerty as ones to watch, featured in the FBD final win over Roscommon last weekend.
Kevin McStay has in the past spoken of his desire to improve and refine the attacking side of Mayo's game - Lee Keegan noted in his RTÉ Sport column this week that the new manager will likely shift them away from dependence of the running game and more towards early foot passing. Ryan O'Donoghue's from injury is a boost, though they are still waiting on Tommy Conroy's availability.
They meet Galway in the televised opener on Saturday night in Castlebar - home advantage being famously a little worse than useless in this fixture.
A year ago, Padraic Joyce was perceived as a manager under pressure, urgently in need of a break. In the final year of his term, a third successive defeat to Mayo in Connacht would have made him a hard sell to the county executive. Short of achieving the ultimate glory, 2022 could hardly have gone better for Galway, who made the leap from talented under-achievers to bona-fide contenders.
In recent decades, Galway football has been inclined to oscillate between periods of success and bouts of torpor. But the buzz is certainly back again. In the off-season, they were boosted by the return to the fold of Ian Burke, notably the county's first football All-Star for 15 years back in 2018.
On the downside, they'll be without a current All-Star, Joyce confirming this week that Liam Silke will not feature in 2023 and is to remain in New Zealand where he works as a doctor. The current saga of the All-Ireland club final may impact on Shane Walsh's availability for the league.
As with last year, fully half the teams in Division 1 are from Ulster. Had Shane McGuigan not paid the obligatory penalty for getting wrestled to the ground and been allowed to take the last minute free-kick in Hyde Park in March, then it might have been five...
Peter Canavan has been forthright in proclaiming a changing of the guard in Ulster, with Donegal and Monaghan, two of the province's leading lights in the 2010s, seemingly on the slide, while Derry and Armagh have moved into the ascendant.
Derry's burst from the pack has been bewildering in its speed. For Armagh, it's been a slow burn. Their ascension to the top table has been touted for several years and can hardly be said to be ahead of schedule. Even last year, they wound up losing two of their four championship games (albeit one of them on penalties). However, the manner of their wins and style of play beguiled the neutrals.
Tyrone's 2022 season puts one in mind of Blackadder's assessment of Baldrick's war poetry - it started badly, tailed off a bit around the middle and the less said about the end the better.
The county's tendency to mount abject All-Ireland title defences has evidently carried into a new era. To the broad mass of counties out there, it's an offensively first-world problem.
Two-time All-Ireland winner Canavan said his county have to get back to basics and focus on becoming hard to beat before they can think again about silverware.
The future is bright nonetheless. Notwithstanding the senior team's travails, Tyrone still won the U20 All-Ireland title last year, another Canavan brother, Ruairí, announcing himself to the public. He and Darragh were pivotal figures as Errigan Ciaran won their first Tyrone SFC title for a decade.
The three remaining Division 1 outfits finished 2022 on a bum note, all engaged in a strikingly protracted search for new management. Teams operating at this level haven't typically found the managerial search such a slog, and there was a nagging sense that the available pool of contenders didn't like the look of their trajectory.
Donegal, under new management of Paddy Carr and Aidan O'Rourke, begin life without their departed chieftan Michael Murphy, who has disappeared behind the GAAGO paywall. While there's an air of year dot around Donegal, they still have a fine array of talent lying about.
Paddy McBrearty, now 29, has replaced Murphy as captain, while Hugh McFadden and Eoghan Bán Gallagher have been installed as "joint vice-captains". Neither is reported to have a deputy working underneath them.
Monaghan finally found a manager in shape of recently retired Vinny Corey. They have become the league's great escapologists in recent seasons, somehow staying in Division 1 despite continual predictions of their demise. This is their ninth successive season in this company. Four times in the last eight years, they've finished sixth and their tales of survival have become steadily more improbable as time has progressed.
In 2020, a draw at home to Meath on the final weekend kept them at up at Mayo's expense. In the shortened campaign of '21, an injury-time goal salvaged extra-time in a relegation playoff against Galway in Clones, Jack McCarron nailing the winner in the 94th minute.
Last year, it took home a one-point win over the Dubs on the final day to keep them where they are. It's hard to see how they can keep upping the ante. A Jimmy Glass style intervention from Rory Beggan probably awaits in 2023.
However, they've become steadily less relevant in the championship since their semi-final appearance in 2018 and their finest players are tipping on in years.
The Rossies, meanwhile, have firmly established themselves as the Norwich City of Gaelic football, zinging back and forth between the first and second tiers. They've done so on a continuous loop every year between now and 2017.
The chief objective of teams in Division 1 is to remain there, while also priming themselves for championship.
As usual, come the closing weeks, the really urgent action will concern the bottom of the table rather than the top.
Division 1: Round one fixtures
Saturday 28 January
Monaghan v Armagh, Castleblayney, 6.30pm.
Mayo v Galway, MacHale Park, 7.30om
Sunday 29 January
Roscommon v Tyrone, Dr Hyde Park, 1.30pm
Donegal v Kerry, Ballybofey, 3.45pm
Follow Mayo v Galway (throw-in 7.30pm) via our live blog on RTÉ.ie/sport or the RTÉ News app, alternatively watch live on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player, from 7.15pm. Highlights and reaction to all the weekend's action on Allianz League Sunday on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player from 9.30pm.
Live commentary and updates also on Saturday Sport and Sunday Sport, RTÉ Radio 1.
