The first thing you learn about the Clare-Galway rivalry is that there isn't one.
"You'd have to put 'rivalry' in inverted commas really, when you're talking about Clare and Galway," says Ger Loughnane.
Their hatred was directed elsewhere. Namely, at Tipperary, the go-to objects of simmering underdog resentment among the hurling fraternity.
It was Tipperary whom Ger didn't want told the time of the throw-in back in '97. It was the sight of a Tipperary jersey, Tony Keady said, which prompted him to play for 'Laois' under his brother's name in that infamous game in New York in 1989. It was Tipperary who were encouraged to 'póg' John Mulhall's thóin' at the 2011 All-Ireland winners' homecoming.
Tipperary may only comprise of one third of the big three - and the least successful third in silverware terms - but they seem to attract the bulk of the ire from the little guy. And the other big guys.
This may be an unavoidable consequence of sharing a border with so many competitive counties, though it's also been argued that the 'home of hurling' moniker stands as an incitement to their neighbours.
Either way, it left Clare and Galway with little room to start hating each other.
During their respective glory days back in the late-80s and mid-90s, Galway and Clare nursed a part fierce, part pantomime hostility towards Tipp, which appears to have lent to their own relationship a touch of 'my enemy's enemy is my friend.'
A common refrain is that whichever team goes longer in the championship has the warm support of the other.
Anthony Daly has spoken before of how the legendary Galway half-back line of the late 80s were his chief hurling heroes as a teenager.
Sylvie Linnane, who comes from Gort near the Clare border, told the Examiner a few years back that he shouts for Clare whenever Galway exit the championship.
Ger Loughnane and Damien Hayes are on the same page in that regard.
"The situation between Clare and Galway, I think, is that Clare would support Galway when they were out of the championship themselves and there'd be a big support for Galway supporting Clare when they themselves would be gone," says Loughnane.
"It's gas. If Galway were in the semi-final and Clare weren't, the people of Clare would shout for Galway. And vice versa," Hayes tells me half an hour later.
Most county rivalries are at their most heated near the border. One might expect folk around Tubber and Beagh to be especially anxious that their team wins out on Sunday.
That may be true for the day that's in it. But there's a long history of co-operation between clubs on either side of the border, co-operation which might not always have been deemed kosher by the GAA authorities had they gotten wind of it.
According to Loughnane, there are several 'John Smiths' hovering near the border who've both Galway and Clare underage medals on the mantelpiece at home.
"A good deal of players from South Galway would have played for teams in Clare under false names.
"This is especially applied to Tubber and Crusheen on the border in north Clare.
"You have numerous tales of players from South Galway - especially from Beagh, Kilbeacanty, all along there - that won championships in Galway and won them in Clare at underage.
"You have the reverse as well. Players from Clare going up and playing with those teams in Galway in underage championships.
"In this digital age of modern media, you couldn't possibly get away with it. But they got away with it at that time.
"It's a running joke now, where you have a lot of fellas in their 50s and 60s who played in both championships."
You could take the parallels between the counties further.
Both Galway and Clare mined two All-Ireland titles from their respective greatest ever eras. Both sensed that the traditional powers were beginning to grow weary of their uppityness. And both felt they were robbed of a chance of a third amid paranoid suggestions of a stitch up from the aristocrats. What 1998 is to Clare, 1989 is to Galway.
For a time, both came to resent the traditional provincial structures in hurling. Clare, because they associated it with bitter failure, Galway, because they were stuck outside the tent.
The provincial divide is one of the chief reasons Galway and Clare never developed a serious rivalry.
"What creates rivalries are the history between teams in championship games, especially in provincial championship games," says Loughnane.
The two teams simply never played enough.
They met three times in the 1960s, during Galway's miserable sojourn in the Munster championship. Clare were the only team Galway managed to beat during that trying eleven year stint; a 12-point win in Nenagh in 1961.
Hurling historians tell us that Galway happened to be in the doldrums during their unfortunate Munster experiment.
In reality, the doldrums were Galway hurling's near permanent residence until the mid-70s.
They did win an All-Ireland title in the early 1920s and they briefly threatened a breakthrough in the early 1950s when they won a National League title and beat Kilkenny in the 1953 All-Ireland semi-final (their first championship win in 24 years).
The county holds the record for the greatest number of All-Ireland semi-final appearances though this is a worthless enough accolade considering they progressed automatically that stage for the most of the 20th century.
Galway still have a negative head-to-head record against every serious hurling county, bar Offaly, a legacy of those decades when they functioned as a pre-All-Ireland final aperitif for whoever came through Munster or Leinster.
For Galway hurling pre-1975, read Dublin hurling pre-2011. Indeed, the correct way to read Galway, as Seán Moran wrote in 2015, may be as "modern hurling's greatest success story. A previously fitful presence that has emerged as a powerhouse of the game."
Clare, likewise, suffered their long decades in the wilderness, well documented at this stage. Clare lost 11 Munster finals between 1932 and 1995, and the rest of the time didn't make it that far.
Loughnane, whose inter-county career spanned from the early 70s until the late 80s, and earned two All-Stars despite never winning a provincial medal, played in roughly half of those final losses. Though he never played against Galway in the championship, Loughnane did meet them in a League final in the twilight of his career in 1987.
"My career coincided with Galway becoming a force in the mid-70s. They were the teams that popularised hurling within Galway and made it the force that it is now.
"(The 1987 League final) was at the very end of my career. Martin Naughton, who was wing forward for Galway, gave me the greatest roasting that I ever got on a field. I said it's time to bail out of this game.
"That was the legendary Galway team that had won everything. They could argue they could have won three in a row, four in a row, five in a row even. From '85 to '90, they were the best team of that era, without a doubt. Now, they won two All-Irelands, And were in very bad luck in others.
"The two they'll always regret were 1986 and 1990. That's the tale of places like Clare and Galway. You'll always think of the ones that got away."
Since Clare's Munster breakthrough in 1995, the two counties have met more routinely. Galway won a glut of underage titles in the early 90s and reached the All-Ireland final with a largely new-ish team in 1993. It was casually expected that this would be the launchpad for another decade like the '80s.
For reasons that remain hard to fathom, those hopes fizzled out and Galway sat out the revolution years, watching from afar as Clare and Wexford and Offaly giddily tormented the confused big three.
Loughnane was on the sideline in three Clare-Galway encounters, all of which were won by his native county.
"I always regarded Galway as a force, even at that time. They always had very, very good hurlers. Any time we beat Galway, it was always with great difficulty. Simple as that. That semi-final in '95 was a terrific game altogether. It was the goals which won it for us that day."
The two teams have remained well matched, for the most part, in the 21st century. Galway lead 4-3 in the head to head since 2000, hockeying a couple of weak and inexperienced Clare outfits in 2009 and 2011.
There were still three Clare survivors from the team annihilated in Salthill in 2011 who featured in last weekend's draw - John Conlon, Patrick O'Connor and Conor McGrath.
"We were after coming off a very poor performance against Dublin," remembers Hayes. "A motivated animal is a dangerous animal. We were psyched for that game.
"Basically, we were better than Clare at that time. Clare were rebuilding with a younger team. Ger 'Sparrow' O'Loughlin was their manager. The following year, Davy Fitz came in and we know what followed."
Perhaps the most infamous - and comically bizarre - meeting between the pair was when Loughnane brought his Galway team to Ennis in 2007.
Like Anthony Daly with Dublin in 2012, Loughnane marched his players through the town to the ground, soaking up the adulation of the opposition fans as he went.
Galway proceeded to give possibly their most insipid performance of an era that wasn't short of them and lost to a Tony Considine managed Clare side who were in some turmoil themselves.
"Ger picked the team just before the match out on the pitch," recalls Hayes. "We played extremely poor the same day. It wasn't a knockout game. Jesus, we were absolutely terrible."
Clare's greatest-ever manager enjoys the bounce and positivity of the current Banner team but stresses the size of their challenge.
"What I like about the Clare team is they're very upbeat," says Loughnane. "They're all very positive. When they do get a few games under their belt, and when they start getting movement, they can build up irresistible momentum.
"But this is the best Galway team I've seen since the great Finnerty, Keady, McInerney team of the late 80s. That's without a doubt.
"They may not have the kind of savagery or ruthlessness that Kilkenny had. But that's the only deficit in it. As regards quality of players, this is a really great team."
The friendliest neighbours in the west meet again this afternoon in Thurles.
Hurling folk on both sides of the divide are keen to emphasise the warmth of relations and lack of rancour in the air.
But nothing can test the cordiality of a rivalry more than a do-or-die championship match.
Two counties with strikingly similar histories will want to make hay on the roll of honour before the empire strikes back.
