Next weekend's clash of the old world blue bloods of Blackrock and St Finbarr's in the Cork hurling decider offers a chance to ponder an empire which was lost.
Perusing the roll of honour in the All-Ireland club hurling championship points to a strange anomaly - namely, Cork's stranglehold on the competition in its first decade and the almost complete dearth of success thereafter.
It was in Cork where the concept of a national or cross-county competition comprising of the best club teams was first birthed in the 1950s. Or at least, that would be the first such tournament where the competing clubs retained their own names.
The original All-Ireland inter-county championship, back in the fledgling days of the association, was essentially a shrunken form of All-Ireland club championship, albeit with the participating club adopting the name of their county. By 1892, the selected club was free to name players from elsewhere in the county and the direct link to the club championship eventually withered away.
In the 50s, as part of a fundraising drive to build new churches around Cork, Bishop Cornelius Lucey conceived of a tournament involving some illustrious club sides from multiple counties. It was an invitational affair called, not unreasonably, The Cork Churches Tournament.
Liam O'Donoghue of Thurles Sarsfields, then in their pomp and chief contributors to the great Tipperary side of the era, reminisced about the competition with the Irish Examiner's Michael Moynihan some years ago.
We had a very successful run in it — and there were five churches built in Cork on the proceeds
"You had the likes of Glen Rovers, St Finbarr's, St Vincent's of Dublin, Mount Sion of Waterford — great teams, and it was very competitive. There was no Munster or All-Ireland club championship at that time, so it was almost viewed like that. We had a very successful run in it — and there were five churches built in Cork on the proceeds."
The concept was soon to flower into something more formal and broad-based and Munster took the lead. The province instituted its own club championship a full half decade before the rest of the country latched on.
The inaugural Munster club championship, contested among the county champions of 1964, was eventually won by Glen Rovers after a re-fixed decider on Easter Sunday 1966.
The original final, against Mount Sion, played in Cashel on the week before Christmas 1965, ended in chaos after a Glen Rovers player, apparently deliberately, trampled the sliotar into the mud in the goalmouth, effectively disappearing it.
One imagines a successful excavation job shouldn't have been beyond whatever team of officials were present but they were soon overtaken by events. The Waterford champs, who'd been frantically chasing an equaliser, were outraged and a mass brawl ensued, members of the crowd eventually getting involved and the match had to be abandoned.
Notwithstanding the rather fractious first edition, the Munster club was deemed a roaring success, St Finbarr's, Carrick Davins and Newmarket-on-Fergus picking up titles before the decade was out.
GAA Congress in 1969 ratified the establishment of an All-Ireland club competition, to commence the following year.
While the first title was won by Roscrea, the Cork City trio soon hit their stride, as Blackrock, Glen Rovers (from the Blackpool area to north of city) and St Finbarr's (from Togher on the southside), divvied up the competition between them.
Between 1972 and 1979, they won seven of the eight on offer, with only James Stephens breaking up the monopoly in 1976.
In those days, the hoopla surrounding the club final wasn't what it later became. For one thing, they weren't automatically entitled to a run around Croker.
None of Blackrock's three All-Ireland victories were played out in Croke Park, though the drawn 1974 decider against Rathnure was held at HQ. The 'Rockies' won the '72 final at Walsh Park, the '74 replay in Fraher Field and the '79 final in Thurles.
Club games post the county championship still held the air of a new-fangled novelty and attendances at All-Ireland finals lagged well behind county deciders. The high-water mark in terms of Cork senior finals was the 1977 decider when St Finbarr's beat Glen Rovers in front of more than 33,000 at the recently built Páirc Uí Chaoimh, still a record attendance for a county final anywhere. The sobriquet 'Little All-Ireland' had attached itself to the Cork final, then more prideful than self-ironic.
Glen Rovers did win their first All-Ireland title at Croke Park in 1973, though the crowd was less than paltry, resembling something like a Queen's Park league game at Hampden, falling well short of four digits. The Irish Press match report, which immediately highlighted Christy Ring's role as trainer in the opening line, was accompanied by a photo of Glen corner-back Pat Barry contesting a high ball "set against bleak and empty terraces."
On the whole, the media coverage was fairly scant - though that accusation hasn't entirely abated. In the press, Roscrea's victory in the inaugural All-Ireland club final was disposed of in a miniscule box in the corner of the page, of the type which might now be reserved for a club hockey match.
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RTÉ News report on the decline of the Railway Cup. Its traditional St Patrick's Day slot in calendar was taken by the All-Ireland club finals
Finals day was a moveable feast in the early years, with the Railway Cup still clinging onto the St Patrick's Day slot. The drawn '74 club final gave early notice of the changing of the guard, the Blackrock-Rathnure humdinger - in which Pat Moylan notched a late equaliser for the Rockies - played as a curtain raiser to the Leinster-Connacht Railway Cup football final.
The Examiner reported that the drawn hurling final had given the "ailing St Patrick's Day programme its biggest boost in years and highlighted once again the attractiveness of the club championship". This ran alongside a doom-laden report about the dreary provincial decider, which raised, ultimately prophetic, questions about the competition's future as a blue riband event. In time, the club finals would elbow the Railway Cup out of its privileged Paddy's Day spot, hastening its slide towards irrelevance.
Finbarr's won their All-Ireland crowns in '75 and '78, beating Fenians and Rathnure.
It was a time of peak Cork triumphalism across the board, with the county seniors raking in All-Irelands. When Ring used to stand at the dressing room door, sending the players out with the words "remember lads, we're from Cork." Ten of the side which completed the three-in-a-row against Kilkenny in 1978 came from the big three - John Horgan, Dermot MacCurtain, Ray Cummins, Pat Moylan and Tom Cashman from Blackrock, JBM, Charlie McCarthy and Gerald McCarthy from St Finbarr's, and Denis Coughlan and Martin O'Doherty from Glen Rovers.
While in bald silverware terms, Blackrock held the upper hand across the decade, winning five Cork titles and three All-Irelands, in Dr Con Murphy's estimation, it was the 'Barr's who shone brightest, at least in terms of legendary personnel.
"They'd Jimmy Barry Murphy, Charlie McCarthy, Gerald McCarthy. They'd a great selection of players, they'd be the best for me," Dr Con tells RTÉ Sport.
One of the more interesting motifs of the era was the presence of Kilkenny all-time great Frank Cummins on the Blackrock team for all three victories. To those who recall the noughties era antipathy between the two counties and the starkly different hurling philosophies promoted in either place - Cork and Kilkenny occupy opposite poles in the 'to-let-it-flow-or-not-to-let-it-flow' debate - the notion of one of Kilkenny's finest players as a stalwart for an aristocratic Cork City outfit feels a little incongruous.
Cummins, who won eight All-Ireland titles for Kilkenny between 1967 and 1983, was stationed as a Garda in Cork and joined the Rockies.
A further irony was that Cummins was originally from Knocktopher, a one-time intermediate club which would soon amalgamate with nearby Ballyhale to form the new Ballyhale Shamrocks club in 1972 - the year of Cummins' first All-Ireland club title with Blackrock.
In March '79, Cummins' Blackrock side held off a furious late rally from the suddenly powerful club from his birthplace to win their third - and last - All-Ireland title, 5-07 to 5-05 in the end. (For two of Blackrock's three club titles, they almost tossed away victory in the final quarter).
And that was that. Two years later, the Barr's were chasing a historic All-Ireland club double, with several dual players in their ranks, JBM prominent among them. But the insurgents from the heart of rural Kilkenny now finally had Cork City's measure. The Shamrocks beat the Barr's 1-15 to 1-11 in the Semple Stadium decider, every one of their scorers called 'Fennelly'.
As Ballyhale native and esteemed hurling writer PM O'Sullivan told RTÉ Sport ahead of the 2020 All-Ireland club final, the '81 final was a seminal moment.
"They were the first country club to win the All-Ireland final in 1981. I suppose they were a bit of an inspiration for other rural clubs like Kilruane and Borris-Ileigh to go and do it."
No longer winning All-Irelands, the Cork City aristos would soon lose control of Cork hurling altogether. The demographics began to tilt against them as the city was hollowed out, the next generation departing for the countryside in search of somewhat more affordable housing.
"Hurling in the city was very, very strong in the 70s. But I do think when the population spread out towards the country, all that changed," says Dr Con.
"Places like Midleton and Carrigtwohill got much stronger with population growth and people didn't move into the city as much.
"You'll see places like Eire Óg and Carrigaline getting stronger as well because all the young people buying houses are moving out that way. They're not buying houses near the big clubs - they're too dear."
One other explanation was proffered by Diarmuid O'Donovan, in discussion with John Coleman in the Irish Examiner some years ago, namely improved transport links, an especially important consideration in a county the size of Cork.
"It got easier for lads to go home. The infrastructure of roads, transport became easier, fellas had their own car. So, from the early '70s on it was easier to move. If you were from Mallow, for instance, it became easier to play with Mallow rather than stay in the city, unless you wanted to."
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RTÉ News report on the unveiling of a statue to Christy Ring in his home village of Cloyne, who he played with before joining Glen Rovers in the city
In a modern context, the most famous hurling migrant of them all, Christy Ring, might have been winning Cork titles with Imokilly rather than Glen Rovers.
Con Murphy recalls how his own father - an All-Ireland winner with the Cork footballers in 1945 - wound up re-forming the essentially defunct Lees football club in the city, due to the impossibility of returning to his native club.
"My father was from Bere Island. He moved up to the city, he was a veterinary surgeon. In 1951, he re-formed the Lees football club with a few others.
"The reason they did it was because they were working a six-day week and travel was very difficult.
"They literally had a team made up of the Roscommon midfield, a Tipperary centre-forward and fellas like that. It was like the colleges. That's because of work and travel. But all that changed as years went by. Travel became easier."
The erosion of their dominance was slow-moving at first. The Barr's were still the team of the 80s in Cork, winning five titles, Blackrock picking up one in 1985. Glen Rovers' 1989 senior title would be their last for over a quarter of a century.
The Barr's won their 25th and last title in 1993, when current manager Ger Cunningham was still manning the goal and barely past his peak. That was more or less it for the big three for the next two decades, save for a burst of Blackrock successes around the turn of the century, which happened to correspond with Cork's abrupt rise from their mid-90s slumber under Jimmy Barry Murphy.
Post the 70s, Cork has made a relatively poor fist of the Munster and All-Ireland club. Kilkenny clubs, mostly Ballyhale, continued to pick up titles. Galway clubs became increasingly dominant from the early 1990s onwards. Only Midleton in the mid-80s and the O'Connor brothers' Newtownshandrum side of the 2000s have claimed silverware beyond the county boundaries.
There's no evidence this most retro of Cork finals will spark any revival but the purists are revelling in it nonetheless.
"I like to see it," says Murphy of the city teams' renaissance. "I'd be a traditionalist. It's a long time since we've seen it. It's a good sign, I think. And hopefully it's a good sign for Cork hurling, going forward."
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