The provincial hurling round robins - the most popular and acclaimed format since the early years of 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?' - conclude this weekend amid more reports of record-breaking attendances.
The sixth edition of the Munster round robin has provided us with its usual store of thrills and gushing superlatives.
Its cut-throat nature was again emphasised by the elimination of the All-Ireland champions with a round to spare, Clare's latest Liam MacCarthy defence faring no better than their last one in 2014.
This weekend, the 2024 finalists and league champions could be hot under the collar, needing to navigate the wildcard challenge of a dangerous Waterford side to avoid a shock exit.
Given the air of triumphalism that had settled over Cork in the last couple of months, this would be quite a rebuke.
Limerick's scarily vengeful hockeying of the Rebels seemed to cause a sharp intake of breath in the rest of hurling nation.
The sentiment wasn't so much 'ye wrote us off coming here today' as 'ye wrote them up coming here today'.
The memes were flowing on whatsapp after this performance, alongside comments like 'great to beat the All-Ireland champions, you know...'
The snarling defiance of the entire county was best epitomised by the blonde woman who made strenuous efforts to shout into the camera when Kyle Hayes was doing his Man of the Match interview.
Cian Lynch flitted around the half-forward position, wreaking extraordinary havoc, like a hurling Johan Cruyff or one of those diminutive Welsh out-halves in the 1970s.
Part of the fascination of Lynch is that he appears to be a new type of playmaker hurler - Noel McGrath perhaps being the closest forerunner. Most attack-minded hurlers of this ability have tended to be very heavy scorers, though, if anything, Lynch's relatively slim scoring tallies seem to enhance his mystique, and you get the impression he would rather lay on a deft assist than swing over a point himself.
The upshot of it all is that we have the unwelcome intrusion of a virtual dead-rubber game this weekend. The Clare supporters have ritually burnt their ironic, imaginary Cork-Tipp half and half jerseys. The All-Ireland champions are simply seeing out their Munster programme, any win only being for the sake of pride or posterity.
In Leinster, meanwhile, another historic fixture has nothing on it. Wexford know they are going no further and - unlike two years ago - are at least not threatened with relegation. Kilkenny know they're in a Leinster final regardless.
Well, technically speaking, the Limerick-Clare game is not a dead rubber.
We're obliged to point out that Limerick could miss out on a Munster final although it would entail losing at home to Clare by 26 points. In a three-way tie on five points, it would come down to score difference with Limerick currently at +22, while Tipperary are in the clubhouse on -3 (despite winning two games and losing one).
In the circumstances, the Clare-Wexford combo strikes us as a good shout this weekend.
Limerick, as is evident from their league form over recent years, have occasionally been known to ration their effort in games of minimal consequence.
In the fortnight before championship, former Limerick captain Declan Hannon tried to tell RTÉ Sport that things just didn't go well for the team in their final league match against Wexford and that it wasn't for the want of trying that they could only register 0-12 at home in a game with nothing riding on it.
Hannon could hardly tell us anything else. Notwithstanding this, there is the suspicion that Limerick have been a touch Serie A in their approach to games of this nature.
In Leinster, of course, it would be in keeping with recent trends for Wexford to beat Kilkenny in rousing fashion in circumstances where the outcome makes little impact on the Cats.
Dead rubbers are an inevitable hazard of any league-based system.
Other sporting cultures have tended to be more relaxed about them, accepting them as a fact of life. Part of the normal tapestry of any league season.
In Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby estimated that roughly half of the Arsenal games he had attended between 1968 and the book's publication in 1992 had been meaningless. (This was in the era before nearly half the teams in the English top flight were allowed into the European Cup.)
The GAA have always been considerably more hawkish on the concept of dead-rubber games in championship, long regarding them with the same kneejerk hostility that Iain Paisley viewed a game of ball on a Sunday.
We aren't that far removed from the days of pure knockout championship that the odd dead rubber game doesn't still feel like an affront. Against God and nature.
This brings us onto the football championship, where the GAA is designing increasingly convoluted formats in order to weed out the dead rubbers entirely.
It was this extreme aversion that gave us the current All-Ireland football championship format, which is being put out to pasture after three editions.
From the outset, there was considerable bemusement that the GAA had insisted on a preliminary quarter-final stage, with three teams advancing from the group phase - all the more strange considering the pressure on the calendar.
Their thinking on this appears to have been conditioned by the experience of the short-lived Super 8s format, which ran in 2018 and 2019.
Group 2 in 2019 threw up a dead rubber weekend, with Dublin and Tyrone already through on four points, while Cork and Roscommon played out a game with nothing on it and which was moved to Páirc Uí Rinn in light of this.
There was at the time much fulminating and bellyaching about the obscenity of a championship game of zero consequence.
This time around, in the interests of warding off the possibility of a dead rubber championship game, they decided to neuter the entire format from the get-go.
Rather than dispense with the preliminary quarter-final and adopt the standard format of allowing the top two teams progress, the association has tossed out the group phase altogether, much to Kieran McGeeney's annoyance.
Geezer is one of the chief enthusiasts of the round robin system, though some of his fury could be put down to change fatigue.
The format from 2026 has been described as a 'qualifier style series' and it is somewhat hard to render snappily in written English. Either way, the desire of the Gaelic football public to bother wrapping their heads around it is somewhat slack at this remove.
Given past experience, we're not hopeful that the 'let-it-in' merchants on the terraces will have a handle on the new championship format when the starter gun is fired next April.
Our old proposal that the association needs an 'Are they out yet or what?' helpline where operators are there to answer in the negative or affirmative could merit another look.
Part of the impulse for the new format is to restore some tangible advantage to the provincial winners, which is very minimal under the present arrangement.
But it would be just the GAA's luck for the current football system to catch fire when it's just being shunted out of the door.
The association seems to have made the avoidance of dead rubbers their lodestar in the football championship, but the example of hurling shows the odd one isn't the end of the world.
Watch a hurling championship double-header, Dublin v Galway (2pm) and Cork v Waterford (4pm), on Sunday from 1.30pm on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player. Follow a live blog on rte.ie/sport and the RTÉ News app and listen to Sunday Sport on RTÉ Radio 1. Highlights on The Sunday Game from 9.30pm
