I was freed of Sunday Game duties last weekend - Tomás Ó Sé was omnipresent across all platforms in any case! - so took a spin into MacHale Park for Mayo-Louth.
My daughter was particularly excited to be catching a glimpse of the green and red in Castlebar. Although, given the game that played out, I don't think she was too sorry when it ended.
The Mayo players, management and supporters will also be relieved it ended when it did, given the fright they got deep in injury-time.
Louth's defensive approach was entirely understandable from Mickey Harte's point of view, given what happened when they left themselves open in the Leinster final.
The weekend again showcased Mayo's issues unlocking blanket defences - and on Sunday, it was more than a mere blanket. It was the duvet, the sheet the whole lot thrown over them.
The big concern for Mayo is if they come up against a team who adopt the same approach but with more quality in their ranks, will they be able to handle it?
You only have to look back at the last two Connacht championship losses - to Roscommon this year and Galway last year - to see them coming unstuck against well-organised defences.
So they've work to do. Although, they're far from alone. In truth, there's plenty of listlessness around the place and no one is really pulling up trees.
As the round robin has progressed, it has felt like we're stuck in a holding pattern, where teams are merely jockeying for position.
I had hoped last week might kick-start it and we did get a couple of decent games in Clones and Ballybofey. Otherwise, however, lethargy reigned.
It's hard to get a read on things and there's a suspicion that some teams are pacing themselves in order to peak come the knockout phase. We're still waiting for the championship to properly begin.
Dublin, for instance, seem to me to be bored. The Leinster championship has been a tick-box exercise for them for the guts of a decade now, and we heard Dessie Farrell acknowledge at the weekend that the format had possibly "taken the edge off" some of these games.
They won handily enough on Saturday, but there's still an air of going through the motions about their performances.
I still suspect that they'll perk up when it comes to the quarter-finals. We could see a far more potent beast emerge. Now is not the time to judge them. When you look at them on paper, arguing that they're not contenders is bananas.
On the other hand, I think Kerry are struggling. They did look impressive in the Munster final but that has been an outlier in the season overall.
On the evidence of the league and the round robin, they're nowhere near the levels they reached in 2022.
Without David Clifford, they'd be in a hole. If he wasn't playing last Saturday, Cork would have beaten them. He's carrying them on their back at the moment.
They can count their blessings for the penalty call too, which proved crucial in the end. Certainly, you would have to classify it as a goalscoring opportunity, though I suspect David Gough might be one of the few referees to apply that rule.
He's a stickler on the rules. And he had made that call before, in the last minute of the Mayo-Monaghan league game in the spring. That was admittedly more inarguable given that Mayo had no one minding the goal at the time.
I suppose the frustration for everybody is you could see an identical situation arise in another game next week, and we'll have a 14 metre free and a yellow card.
Kerry will likely beat Louth in the final group game, but in all probability, they're going to have to navigate a prelim quarter-final, which complicates things further.
The main takeaway is that every team is flawed. Galway are probably most on track although they haven't exactly wowed us in the round robin either.
But Westmeath have been gamey so far in the round robin, showing up better than the league form indicated, and Galway still won comprehensively enough in the end.
The dearth of goals has been a particular frustration, even if Derry rode in to save the day late on Sunday afternoon. The four games in the Sam Maguire on Saturday produced one goal and that was Kerry's penalty.
In the midst of it all, we've heard 101 ideas on how to improve the game as a spectacle, given the widespread disenchantment with slow possession play and defensive systems.
I'd been hesitant enough to enact radical rule changes, not least because of the difficulties officials will likely have in policing them.
A shot clock sounds good in theory but I could foresee it proving a mess in practice.
Colm Parkinson's proposal - on Smaller Fish - that you have to keep three forwards up the pitch at all times is a smart idea.
On balance, however, I'd be inclined to hold fire on rule changes and let the game evolve without tinkering. For me, the onus is on teams to figure out a way forward. We're no strangers to doom-mongering in Gaelic football. There does seem to be a crisis every few years - or even every few months - about how the game is being played.
Some team will steal a march on the competition with a new tactic - the most dramatic example being Donegal in 2012. Eventually, teams figured out how to counterract that.
I still hold the view that a safety-first approach doesn't win you All-Irelands. The teams that are brave in how they approach games and how they attack usually triumph at the end of the season. Hopefully, once the present shadow-boxing ends, we'll see some football to get the blood pumping.
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