On the 11 July 2015 something that would seem impossible now happened - Dublin knocked Limerick out of the All-Ireland hurling championship.
Since then, the Treaty men have gone on to claim five All-Ireland titles, and are looking to become the first senior county to do five in a row later on this year. They could write themselves into the history books as the greatest group of inter-county hurlers ever.
Dublin, on the other hand, have undoubtedly fallen back.
One trip to a Leinster final - with the squad greatly weakened by Covid 19 - in 2021 and some hard fought victories over Galway and Wexford are all they have to show for their efforts since.
But while the Tribesmen have managed to bring their Liam MacCarthy famine to an end since that July day in 2015, and themselves and Wexford have both lifted the Bob O'Keeffe Cup, Dublin's brief run of success - a league title in 2011, and a Leinster in 2013 - has stalled.
The fear amongst some in the county is that Dublin hurling is set to return to the level it was at near the start of the century following on from a real trimming against Clare in last year's All-Ireland quarter-final.
While still only early in the new season, their form in 2024 would not instil much confidence that anything is going to change when the Leinster Championship gets underway in five weeks.
The team were completely outclassed by Limerick at Croke Park, shipping an 18-point defeat. This led Neil McManus to wonder on the RTÉ GAA Podcast whether Micheál Donoghue might already be thinking about life after Dublin.
One might reasonably argue that John Kiely's side are hardly the team the Dubs should be measuring themselves against, but when you look at the narrow victory over Antrim - where a goalkeeping error handed Dublin victory - and the defeat to Galway on Sunday, where the team battled to move ahead, only to fail to score for over 20 minutes, it's fair to say that it has been a disappointing spring for the Sky Blues who finish their campaign against Westmeath today.
League is league, and championship is championship, but the more fundamentally worrying thing is the fact that the underage success, on which the renaissance of the small ball game had been built in the capital, has also begun to dry up in the last half decade.
Dublin won six Leinster minor titles between 2007 and 2018, but they haven't even been to a final since. At Under-20 level, where the county won five Leinsters in 14 seasons, the fall off has come a year or two later, with 2020 their last triumph at the grade, although the Dubs did reach the provincial decider the following year.
This has coincided with the greatest era of Dublin football we've ever seen - nine Sam Maguire successes since 2011 - but the two codes are not at loggerheads with one another according to 1965 All-Ireland minor hurling winner, and current chairperson of the Friends of Dublin Hurling, Eugene Davey.
"You get 25 guys together and if they're prepared to listen you coach them in football," says the man who played both football and hurling for the county.
"Hurling is a mammoth task [to coach]. Hurling, as a product, is very easy to sell. I don't care if you're a soccer fan, you go to a game of hurling and you'll be impressed.
"There's more people playing hurling in Dublin than ever before. My son is involved in St Pat's in Donabate and they're really enthusiastic [but] it's the quality of player that we're producing.
"If we had four Coláiste Eoins in Dublin - two on the southside and two on the northside - then we could put the coaches into those schools and try to sell the product."
Coláise Eoin is a secondary school on the Stillorgan dual carriageway. They won the Leinster Colleges championship in 2020, having made the decider the year before.
Alongside St Fintan's, they are the sole individual representatives from Dublin in the biggest post-primary schools competition in the province - one which has been dominated by Kilkenny schools - although Dublin North and South selections have also been involved in recent decades.
"With the school calendar there's a lot of competition for time [from different sports]," adds Davey.
"Since the Christian Brothers left we're depending on the teachers and they're a different ethos. You do get groups of enthusiastic teachers but you have to go to the school and sell the product to them.
"In Dublin the football is a very attractive thing to sell and it's a much easier thing to play."
When it comes to transferring that success to senior level, Davey goes back to what made the difference in the last decade, when Dublin were more competitive among the senior counties - Anthony Daly.
"Daly got a good group of hurlers together during that time - [Conal] Keaney, Peter Kelly - some really good hurlers. Liam Rushe, I remember watching him in Parnell Park one day, he threw three Kilkenny fellas out of his way before setting up a goal. You need about five or six Liam Rushes.
"Daly had that mad craziness, you'd do anything for him, that was the type of man he was."
Ultimately Davey would love to see a "Director of Hurling" appointed in Dublin to oversee progress in the county, suggesting that while money has helped Limerick's success, it needs to be managed well.
"I'm sure JP McManus said [to Limerick GAA], 'what do you need? I'm not going to give out money willy nilly and I'll be looking at your progress. I'll give it whatever I have to.'
"That said, you don't throw money at it. It needs to be managed.
"Micheál Donoghue is doing his best. Any other manager could come in and do worse. The problem they have is they've no corner forward, they're not scoring enough goals.
"You need to build it and it has to be through the schools."
Conal Keaney gave 20 years to Dublin GAA, playing football and hurling like Davey. He won five Leinster SFC titles before switching codes to play hurling from 2011 onwards.
He was on the field when the Dubs beat Kilkenny in the 2011 Allianz League final at Croke Park, and two years later when they overcame Galway to land a first Leinster crown in 52 years.
He soldiered on until finally retiring, for a second time, before the start of the 2021 season.
"It's not an easy answer," he says when asked how to get Dublin back to where they were a decade ago.
"I think it [the decline] stems back to when Daly left. That period there, the transition, was very poor. Things were handled extremely badly and I think we still haven't recovered from that point."
He agrees with Davey that Dublin needs to be better at colleges (secondary school) level if the senior inter-county team is to consistently do well.
"The secondary schools competition was for us, when I was growing up, a huge learning curve. You're getting exposed to top-level hurling against the other teams down the country, like St Kieran's College [Kilkenny]. That definitely helps.
"Some continuity between the U16s, minor and senior needs to be there. The right people need to be involved. That means more homegrown Dublin people being involved.
"Too many times we've gone outside and it just doesn't work consistently, no matter what anyone says. Yes, Anthony Daly was a different kettle of fish. He immersed himself in Dublin, spent a lot of time up here, went around the clubs and he really became a Dub.
"You don't go down to Kilkenny and get an outsider involved - you never hear of that happening. In any other of the so-called big hurling counties they have their home homegrown lads involved in some capacity.
"There may be a Davy Fitzgerald who goes around but he certainly brings other lads with him from inside. The more lads you have inside, that it really means something to them, it makes a big difference as a player sitting in the dressing room that you're fully behind these guys."
Last season the Blues went into the campaign without the likes of Cian O'Callaghan and Liam Rushe, and particularly former captain Chris Crummey, who has returned to the panel this season.
Eoghan O'Donnell, one of the best full-backs in the game, has been out injured since January and his return for the Leinster SHC is not a certainty at this stage. More positively, from a Dublin perspective, is the return of Donal Burke, a brilliant free-taker but also a dab hand at amassing scores from open play.
Keaney is clear that the current shortfalls of the Dublin team go back to that period after Daly stepped away 10 years ago, acknowledging that current manager Donoghue has been dealt a difficult hand.
"That's not questioning Micheál Donoghue at all," he says of his call for more native Dublin involvement in the management team in the future.
"Picking an outside guy sometimes works, I'm just not sure it consistently works. Picking an outside guy with his own outside guys [management team] does not help.
"You need to have a Dublin man involved in it. There's plenty of passionate lads around that want hurling to succeed, and have been through it. Not enough of those guys are involved for one reason or another, and they haven't been involved.
"That's at the top end. You obviously also need the younger lads coming through the colleges, competing at minor level, and more of a connection [to the seniors] with all of that.
"People will say the [competition with the] football is an issue but I don't really agree with that. There's enough talented hurlers there to do something but the level they're at at the minute is just not the level that Dublin expects to be at.
"I don't think it's acceptable and it's nearly getting to the stage where the performances and the results we're getting are acceptable, which is not the norm and it's not acceptable.
"Michael is doing his best and he's doing what he can. He was hit with a few lads that went away and then with injuries, which is very difficult."
Keaney's former Dublin team-mate Ryan O'Dwyer recently told the Mirror that, "You could get Brian Cody to come in as manager next year and Liam Sheedy as a selector and Anthony Daly as coach and it's not going to make any blind bit of difference."
Keaney is still involved with his club Ballyboden St Enda's and got 20 minutes in the Dublin SHC final defeat to Na Fianna last October.
As such, he's seeing what's coming through at club level first hand and strongly disagrees with the idea that standards are dropping.
"I don't believe that the hurlers aren't there," he says.
"If you look at any of the club games, and I'm still involved, any time a team gets out now [of Dublin] - Cuala were very successful, Na Fianna got to the provincial final and arguably could have won it.
"So anyone who gets out of Dublin does very well. The hurlers are there but it does need work on the ground."
And with a decent record against Galway over the last decade, including a draw in last year's Leinster SHC, coupled with just one championship defeat against Wexford since 2009, Keaney thinks that 2024 can't be written off just yet.
"It's not too far gone," he says of the fall away in form, so far, this year.
"I think you need a couple of lads back. Chris Crummey is back, a huge leader in that team, who is only just finding his feat after being away. Eoghan O'Donnell is still injured and Danny Sutcliffe and Donal Burke are just coming back.
"These are the main leaders in the team and if you're missing any of your main guys it's a problem. Hopefully they'll be fully fit come the championship. There'll be a bit of a sting in those lads because they don't want to getting results like the ones they've got so far.
"They're earmarking the championship for a couple of big performances so I wouldn't be surprised if that happens. It's not beyond the bounds to catch any of the teams on the hop even if it doesn't look like it now.
"Inside that group I'm sure the burning desire is to show that they're not as bad as they've been going. Some of the performances have been good but they haven't really backed it up with a full 70 minutes.
"There's a lot to work on, the overall results have been disappointing, but there's still a lot of positives there."
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