To win an All-Ireland title with your club is extra special.
I said after Sunday's Intermediate final that winning with Carrickshock outweighed anything else I’d done and I genuinely meant that.
To do it with lads you’ve grown up with just makes it an awful lot better, especially as when you’re involved with an inter-county team, you’re not around the club as much as you’d like to be.
It was a real family affair. There were four Powers and three Tennysons on the field at the end, and there were other brothers involved as well.
To have my brothers Jamie and John there, and my cousins Shane and John, was huge.
For the parish as a whole, when we came back to Stoneyford on the Saturday night and Hugginstown on Sunday and saw the amount of kids and parents there, it really hit home what it meant to everyone.
For the young lads involved with the panel, to get to Croke Park so early will really drive them on.
Apart from the guys who had been lucky enough to play with Kilkenny, they wouldn't have seen it. My brother Jamie played in the old Croke Park, he never got a chance to play in the new one.
For lads like that, when the bus is pulling up, you look around and see in their eyes that the dream has become reality.
We were relegated in 2015 and you’re just looking to try and win an intermediate championship in Kilkenny. Anything after that is an added bonus. Tommy and the selectors had everything right and no stone was left unturned in the preparation for us to get that performance.
From my own point of view, to get back playing again, when it didn’t look like I would, probably made it that extra bit sweeter again.
I didn’t think I’d see Croke Park again after 2015, when I had to announce my retirement. The knee is sore but it’s definitely worth it.
Long-term, it’s not feasible to keep doing what I’m doing. You’re going from training to training and match to match trying to get things right and it just makes things very difficult.
I’m going to take some time off and look into a couple of procedures, then hopefully get back playing again towards the latter end of the year.
Kilkenny lacking fight
Kilkenny look in a bit of bother after their two defeats.
There doesn’t seem to be the same determination within the camp. A lot of the younger guys coming in aren’t really putting their hands up to Brian as serious contenders to start in the Championship. There’s no-one really stepping up to the mark.
You don’t know where the next TJ Reid or Richie Hogan is going to come from, they just don’t seem to be there.
There was no real fight shown in Clare on Sunday. That’s my biggest fear. Kilkenny teams in the past have always stayed going, even when things aren’t going their way, and they didn’t do that.
Sunday showed up a few cracks that need to be covered fairly quickly. They’re probably looking at a relegation battle now unless they win their last three games and that’s going to be very difficult.
I said from the outset that I didn’t think the league was a huge priority for Kilkenny but no one wants to be relegated.
League of extraordinary results
It’s been a strange, unpredictable league so far. I got the three winners completely wrong last week!
It’s hard to know why exactly. Different managers have different priorities perhaps, so it’s only really all going to materialise over the next couple of weeks.
I felt Dublin were in a bit of trouble after their display against Tipperary and then they turn around and give that performance on Saturday night, even without the Cuala players.
I spoke highly about Cork last week and they didn’t deliver either. After a great performance against Clare, to play the way they did against Dublin was surprising. Consistency has been Cork’s problem the last couple of years but then they’re also a young team.
Tipperary are way ahead of the pack at the moment. To go without Seamus Callanan and John O’Dwyer from the start against Waterford and still win shows the strength in depth of their panel.
I thought Waterford would win that game but they didn’t show us anything new. I was impressed with them in Nowlan Park but then it looked like Tipperary beat them in third gear.
What makes the closeness of the competition even more interesting is the Wexford phenomenon.
The Davy factor is picking up momentum and the fact that Wexford are in pole position now to be promoted means whoever goes down from 1A is facing the prospect of playing Galway and Limerick to get back up.
