With the Presidential race coming fast on the horizon, the Fianna Fáil leadership's frantic search for a candidate not called Ahern has led them to tap up Jim Gavin for the role.
The Irish Mirror has gone so far as to describe the Presidency as "the next logical step" for former Dublin football manager Gavin after his stellar career.
In the 2010s, Gavin guided the Dubs to the historic first five-in-a-row, an achievement that might well depress his vote in rural Ireland.
However, then he went and spearheaded the committee which 'fixed' Gaelic football - at least in the eyes of the common punter, if not all the members of the coaching community - a feat of legislative engineering on a par with the American constitution.
Through it all, he has maintained a business-like decorum, a presidential bearing, at his moments of greatest triumph.
We've had Taoisigh who've had heavy involvement in sport, notably Jack Lynch, one of Cork hurling's all-time greats, who won six All-Ireland titles in the 1940s (five more than Gavin managed as a player). Then there's Charlie Haughey, who won a Dublin SFC title with Parnell's, a club who, like the man himself, were later dragged into financial controversy.
Bertie Ahern was a stalwart of the Dublin junior soccer scene, Enda Kenny was the son of a Mayo All-Ireland winner and long-time intermediate club footballer, while John A Costello was playing golf when the Easter Rising broke out.
What of the Presidency though? Gavin, if he decides to run, will assuredly be the most sporting figure to ever contest the office. What about the previous incumbents of the role?
Douglas Hyde
The first President was an early patron of the GAA and has given his name to the county grounds in Roscommon, a venue which has held more Connacht finals than any other.
However, in sporting terms, he might be best known for being surely the most famous victim of the Ban - aka, Rule 27, which forbade GAA members from attending or participating in rival sports.
Not long after his ascension to the office of President, Hyde attended an Ireland-Poland soccer international in Dalymount Park.
One didn't have to be the most eagle-eyed member of the famed 'Vigilance Committee' to spot the President up in Dalyer's equivalent of the Royal Box. (Officers of the vigilance committee were the only GAA members who had a licence to attend rival sporting events due to their important surveillance work).
There followed a four-month controversy where the GAA took a deep breath and asked itself was it really going to ban the founder of the Gaelic League and strip him of his (wholly honorific) position.
Various get-out clauses were advanced. Mayo footballer George Ormsby had his ban overturned after the GAA accepted he had only attended a soccer match in his capacity as a member of an Garda Siochana.
In the end, the ban was upheld and Hyde wasn't reinstated before his death in 1949.
Ireland won the match, by the way, with Bill Fallon, Johnny Carey and Jimmy Dunne on the scoresheet in a 3-2 victory.
Paddy Hillery
On the day Hillery officially stepped down on 2 December 1990, RTÉ reporter Colm Connolly disclosed in a profile that the outgoing President had, in 1977, become "the lowest handicapped golfing head of state in the world."
This was accompanied by footage of him striking a crisp bunker shot and draining a fast-breaking putt in Lahinch.
It was reported that Hillery had got his handicap down to seven during his time in office, which was at the time taken as evidence that the duties of the Presidency weren't terribly strenuous.
Gene Kerrigan, then a reporter with Magill, was dismissive of its influence.
"The first president, Douglas Hyde, was useful because he was a Protestant and his election (unopposed) showed that the south was not sectarian... Sean T O'Kelly looked nice in a top hat. De Valera was great at impressing Americans and was something of a tourist attraction. Ó Dálaigh provoked an interesting row with the coalition (over his decision to refer the Emergency Powers Bill to the Supreme Court to test its constitutionality). Hillery got his golf handicap back in shape."
Shortly after his death, the Clare Champion had recounted how Hillery had, "in 1980, when he was president of Ireland, won the Golf Links Cup (in Lahinch) on August Bank Holiday Monday, a major strokeplay event which attracted a huge entry."
Given Hillery's reputation for integrity, we can safely assume he won the competition without availing of any of the Presidential lies regularly enjoyed by the current occupant of the White House, himself a prolific winner of club championships.
The only pity of it all is that Hillery didn't live long enough to get a crack at breaking 50 with Bryson DeChambeau off the forward tees on the latter's YouTube channel.
Eamon De Valera
Dev was sitting beside Douglas Hyde at the infamous soccer match against Poland, with Oscar Traynor seated on the other side of the President.
However, as neither were members of the GAA, they couldn't be sanctioned.
De Valera was famously a rugby man, believing it to be the game best suited to the Irish temperament.
Indeed, he came agonisingly close to earning an international cap for Ireland, as outlined by Paul Rouse on 'The Rest is History' recently.
A Maths teacher in Rockwell College in Tipperary in the early 1900s, he was part of the team which reached the Munster Cup final in 1905 and played in a trial game for Munster that year.
Trialled at full-back where Ireland were short, lore has it that Dev dropped a cross-kick which bounced off his chest with the try-line gaping. The national selectors evidently took a dim view. The player who beat him to the Munster full-back jersey later nailed down a place in the Ireland team for many years.
Given the well-known dictum that it was harder to get off the Ireland team than it was to get on it in those years ("I think the previous fella died or something," Willie John McBride said one time, when reminiscing about his first cap) it's possible that De Valera could have had a very different future mapped out for him, had things transpired otherwise. Irish history might have been very different.
De Valera's preference for rugby over other sports is attested to in various asides, notably to the British Ambassador Andrew Gilchrist, when he said: "For my part, I have always preferred rugby."
During his 14 years as President between 1959 and 1973, De Valera was naturally a fixture in the Hogan Stand on All-Ireland final day, even if the prime position was wasted on him as he couldn't see five yards in front of him by then.
Mary McAleese
McAleese's post-Presidency has seen her appointed as chairperson of the Steering Group on Integration, charged with overseeing and implementing the integration of the GAA, the Camogie Association and the Ladies Gaelic Football Association.
According to the wise old talking heads in the GAA, this is a bureaucratic challenge which makes fixing Gaelic football's rules look like a relative doddle.
McAleese has recalled how she played camogie as a girl growing up in Ardoyne. Though there was no 'Stop the Drop' campaign at the time and by her late teens, she was a self-described "GAA groupie", her husband Martin being the captain of the Antrim minors.
Michael D Higgins
Our outgoing President is best known in sporting terms as a League of Ireland follower. Though a Clare man by birth, he is more closely associated with Galway in the public mind, having been a TD for Galway West for several decades before his election to the Presidency.
Indeed, he was President of Galway United before he was President of Ireland. He happened to be mayor of Galway during the club's finest hour in 1991, when Johnny Glynn's winner saw off Shamrock Rovers in the FAI Cup final.
"I'm a person who's committed to the league for the simple reason that I know the families that are involved," Higgins said in an interview with Second Captains Saturday on RTÉ Radio 1 at the weekend.
In his early years as (Irish) President, he was known to take a jaunt out to Tolka Park for a game. Back in 2013, he had a close-up view as manager Alan Matthews was regularly accosted by irate home supporters at the end of another defeat.
On Second Captains Saturday, he let slip that he has possession of Robbie Brady's jersey from Ireland's 1-0 win over Italy in Euro 2016 in Lens.
