"It's a funny thing to tell you, there was a time came in Tipperary when people got fed up us winning. They were nearly hoping we'd be beaten" - John Doyle
For Dublin supporters, Sunday could prove both the greatest day - and the last great day for a while.
Five in a row is such a totemic achievement - partly because it has famously eluded great teams in both hurling and football - that it feels like the end of a journey.
There are suggestions floating about that Jim Gavin might decide that completing the five in a row would provide the ideal opportunity to walk away in a blaze of glory. (That's assuming the businesslike one isn't indifferent to the whole concept of 'glory'.)
Former Dublin footballer Barry Cahill speculated that Gavin and Stephen Cluxton, the latter pushing 38, might decide they've done enough at the end of a five in a row season.
Even if the pair did leave, and it's still a decent-sized 'if', then it's of course no guarantee that Dublin won't keep winning.
The current Dublin squad is clearly the most formidable ever assembled in the history of Gaelic football. It's unfortunate for Gavin (though on second thoughts, he probably doesn't care) that many believe that anyone could win the All-Ireland with that team.
The old line Zdenek Zeman used when sneering at Fabio Capello's trophy haul comes to mind - "I could put my dead grandfather in charge of the teams he has and they'd still win".
For those fatalists who believe the future of inter-county football is Dublin winning forever and a day, it would take an almost unfathomable degree of managerial incompetence to fail to win with this team.
Either way, Dublin GAA is a fine-tuned and sophisticated operation at administrative level and they are highly unlikely to install the village idiot in Gavin's place.
We'll possibly only properly calibrate Gavin's influence after he's gone.
The point here is not that the great days will cease because Gavin will depart and Dublin will stop winning.
It's that any wins that immediately follow the five in a row will begin to feel more and more hollow and passé.
Five in a row is a historic achievement. Six in a row may feel like an uncomfortable anti-climax.
We've all met Dublin supporters who've admitted to having some heretical thoughts. One admitted to me the other day that he was intent on enjoying the possible five-in-a-row victory as much as he can because he knew all the questions about funding would only be amplified further in the aftermath.
He basically agreed with the proposition that it might not be a bad idea for Dublin to lose a championship game at some time in the near future.
The point here is not that the great days will cease because Gavin will depart and Dublin will stop winning. It's that any wins that immediately follow the five in a row will begin to feel more and more hollow and passé.
We've seen how ennui can set in at provincial level.
Leinster titles, particularly ones where Meath were pipped in the final, used to be celebrated with gusto by Dublin supporters.
Nowadays, crowds have plummeted at Leinster championship games and Dublin supporters and ex-players are currently the loudest advocates of abolishing the provincial championships.
Journalist and Dublin fan Neil Cotter said the idea for his book 'Dublin: The Chaos Years' came to him in 2016 while he was bored watching another Leinster 'turkey shoot'.
"I was just thinking it wasn't always like this. There must be something more... We've lost the sense of joy we had in 2011 when Cluxton nailed that point."
Cotter was careful not to speak for all Dublin supporters when he admitted to feeling a tad conflicted about the recent bonanza. But he did stress that this perspective was common enough among his circle.
No doubt there are a smattering of Dublin supporters who celebrate like Marco Tardelli after the fifth goal in 23-point win over Westmeath.
But they surely don't represent the majority.
The endless talk about resources and Bertie Ahern era funding is evidently resented by the supporters (we can say that with a fair degree of certainty), as well as by former and current players.
Charlie Redmond bulldozed into the debate around Dublin's various advantages with a couple of memorable arguments this week. The population thing, he argued, isn't that big a deal because Gaelic Games in the capital faces greater competition from rival sports than it does in culchie land.
So far, so hackneyed. Charlie, however, injected an original element into it by bizarrely instancing basketball and golf as two sports which pose a particular threat to Gaels in Dublin.
Those massed on the other side of the argument got a fine laugh out of this. Charlie could perhaps have chosen his examples more wisely. As a matter of record, the two most successful basketball clubs in the Irish Super League are both from Cork and the current champions are Tralee.
As for golf, who can forget coddle slurping, Colin Farrell sound-a-like Shane Lowry winning the Open Championship in Royal Portrush last month? He was seen later on squirting brown sauce in on top of the beer inside the Claret Jug. 'F****n delish, man!' Lowry told reporters.
The narrative about resources has forced Dublin supporters into a curious position. Sports fans usually prefer to dwell on the good times and the glory days, but Dublin fans, wary of the tone of discussion surrounding their ongoing dominance, now hark back endlessly to the grim era between 1996 and 2010, when they often times hadn't even the glow of the Delaney Cup to keep them warm.
There's a touch of Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen about their reminiscence as if no sports fan ever endured a trial like it.
Fans regularly insist, apropos of nothing, that they know this success won't last forever, with a pessimism that many regard as unwarranted.
It's clear that the disturbing spectre of the culchies losing heart is one that worries many Dublin supporters. Both in terms of the resultant hit to overall 'craic' levels in inter-county football but also because of the corrective reaction it might provoke in the authorities down the line.
Dublin fans used to be renowned for their playful braggadocio back when success was thin on the ground.
But now that a fair chunk of the rest of the country has resigned itself to the capital winning for the forseeable, we've had to adjust ourselves to the strange spectacle of Dublin supporters hemming and hawing and playing down their chances.
Pat Gilroy, in one of those business pep talks he gave in the wake of his Dublin stint, told his audience that it was probably in the interests of the GAA if Dublin were successful "the odd time. Not every year (audience laughter). We'd be happy with every year!"
The question as to whether Dublin fans are made happy by winning every year has been tested to its limits in the Jim Gavin era.
Should they win, life won't ever again get better for Dublin fans. Either there's a major exodus and they fall from their lofty perch. Or, as the rural fatalists would have it, they continue to win and win while the public, including their own, grow more apathetic.
The Five-in-a-Row, if Dublin do manage it, will be a towering achievement and place the team in unique historic territory.
The six in a row will be considerably harder to hype.
