It's rare that the hype and yearning is more focused on the county with 30 All-Irelands than the county with four.
This week, most of the pre-game romance has attached itself to Cork, with Pat Horgan seeking to pull off the Dinny Allen move of finally winning an All-Ireland very late in the day after an extremely long inter-county career.
Clare, 'smaller fish' according to a former manager and one-time whipping boys according to a former captain, are in the unusual position of being the slightly less heart-warming choice from most neutrals' perspective.
The stat has been well circulated that all four teams in the All-Ireland final across both codes are seeking to bridge a gap of over a decade - an exceptionally unusual event and certainly the first time it's happened since 1989.
Clare have the shortest gap of any of the four and are the only team in action over the next eight days with current All-Ireland senior medallists in the squad.
From the starting team named by Brian Lohan on Friday, just four are veterans of the 2013 All-Ireland saga - David McInerney, Tony Kelly, John Conlon and Shane O'Donnell.
Seadna Morey, who came off the bench in the replay and embarked on that injury-time solo run up the left wing to set up the insurance goal for Darach Honan, is likewise named among the substitutes this Sunday.
As the only previous All-Ireland final between Clare and Cork, the 2013 decider - aka, the 'Holy Moses' final - has naturally been the subject of plenty of retrospectives this week.
There's also been a degree of mystification as to how all the promise of the revolutionary summer evaporated over the subsequent years.
The 2013 campaign was such a wild outlier in the context of the era generally, the form-lines across the championship bearing no relationship to the years around about it.
Twelve months later, Kilkenny and Tipp were back contesting the All-Ireland final and the previous season began to seem like a strange hallucinatory episode, albeit a highly enjoyable one for Clare fans.
They failed to muster a championship win against top tier opposition in the next two seasons and wouldn't return to Croke Park for five years.
By the time they recorded their next win in the Munster championship against Limerick in 2017 - at which stage Davy Fitz was gone - Ger Loughnane was sufficiently unimpressed and disgusted to publicly write off the 2013 victory as a "fluke" in his Star column.
In fact, that undersells it. Loughnane actually described it as "the greatest fluke of all time" and said Clare fans had to "face the reality that, as a group, this is a limited bunch."
And yet, back in 2013, you'd be forgiven for thinking we were at the dawn of a new era. Bliss was it in that autumn to be alive and to be young and a Clare hurler was very heaven.
The perception at that time was that the All-Ireland was won massively ahead of schedule, with Clare then slap bang in the middle of an unprecedented era of dominance at Under-21 level.
With zero history of prior success at the grade, Clare won four Munster and All-Ireland U21 titles between 2009 and 2014, racking up three in a row in imperious fashion between '12 and '14.
By the late noughties, Clare had entered a lull at senior level, after the last survivors of the 90s uprising began to slope off into retirement, finally conceding that a third Liam MacCarthy was beyond them.
But along came the clutch of U21 stars, all of whom had been primary schoolkids at the zenith of the Loughnane era in the mid-to-late 90s.
A week after Kilkenny completed the four in-a-row at senior level, a John Conlon inspired Clare pipped them in a driving finish in the U21 final. That side also boasted Colin Ryan, Honan, Darragh O'Donovan, Cian Dillon, Conor McGrath and Nicky O'Connell.
They were, as Conlon recalled this week, handed a bracing introduction to life at senior level. With Clare in transition, the senior management leaned a little hard on their U21 heroes at the beginning of the last decade, leading to a couple of miserable years, the low point being a woeful hammering away to Galway in Salthill in 2011.
"That '21s team (from 2009) all got thrown in at the deep end," Conlon told Anthony Daly in an RTÉ Sport interview this week. "We had a few tough days."
The '09 triumph proved to be just the aperitif with the actual golden generation arriving a few years later.
The notable thing about the three-in-a-row team of 2012-14 was not just the titles won but their absolute dominance during the period. Kilkenny, Antrim and Wexford were dispatched in those All-Ireland finals, by margins of six, 22 and nine points respectively.
Kelly was a core part of all three wins, and had already been crowned Senior Hurler of the Year by the time he captained them to third. In the months leading up to his 20th birthday, Kelly had won senior and U21 All-Irelands, as well as the Hurler of the Year and Young Hurler of the Year awards.
Peter Duggan and Morey likewise started all three finals, while McInerney and O'Donnell were on board for two. David Reidy and current captain Conor Cleary featured in the 2014 side.
Paul Kinnerk, who'd been drafted in as a coach to the Clare minors in 2010 by Gerry O'Connor and Donal Moloney, branded the the 2012-14 U21s as "an incredible group, a once-in-a-lifetime group."
In the winter of 2013, there was an air of triumphalism and giddy expectancy akin to Tipperary in 2010.
If the mid-90s team had willed themselves over the line against the odds, slaying decades old demons along the way, then this generation felt more like the anointed one.
As Daly put it to Conlan this week, "I would have said now that you were around a racing cert to win a lot of medals, around '13.
"We'd dominated the U21 All-Ireland. You must have been feeling, 'I'm going to get Munsters, I'm going to be here in All-Irelands...' Barring the league in '16, it just didn't happen."
"A few lads kinda left," says Conlon. "(Brendan) Bugler and Paddy (Donnellan). And they were hard within the group to replace.
"We just couldn't click, we might play one good season and then have a very bad season or two.
"That was the disappointing thing. It wasn't for the want of trying. We tried our hearts out to get there."
Clare's failure to build on the 2013 victory and their struggles in an era when that U21 crop should have been peaking obviously generated a fair deal of handwringing but it's worth noting that it's far from the most egregious example of a dominant underage side failing to replicate it at senior level.
Limerick's three-in-a-row U21 team of 2000-02 vanished into mediocrity at senior, the unlikely run to the 2007 All-Ireland final aside. Donal O'Grady, a bit-part figure at U21 level, was the only member of those squads that stuck around long enough to win a Munster title. Set against that standard, Clare have mined a reasonable amount from their own golden crop.
With the Moloney/O'Connor joint-ticket steering things, Clare had their first properly good championship summer since the All-Ireland victory in 2018. Conlon, unmarkable at full-forward, had probably his best ever season and earned a first All-Star.
They were a whisker away from an All-Ireland final but were edged out by Galway in a replay and then regressed again the following year, failing to escape Munster.
Under the forbidding, inscrutable management of Lohan, whose status as an unimpeachable folk hero is set in stone thanks to his playing career, Clare have finally found some consistency.
But championship silverware has proved elusive. With Limerick looming over the entire hurling landscape, Clare re-inhabited their previous role as Munster championship nearly men, albeit without the same air of eternal and cosmic angst that prevailed around 1993 and 1994. Happily, most of that baggage was shed during the Loughnane era and will take at least a few more decades of underachievement to accumulate again.
After two successive semi-final losses of Kilkenny - both different varieties of sickening - they finally got the better of the Cats this month thanks to a timely late surge. The semi-final win arrived after what had been a comparatively flat Munster final performance and things had looked grimmer again at half-time that day.
"There was that pressure – to lose three in a row up here, on the back of three in a row in Munster – but sometimes you just get fed up and it has to stop some time," said Lohan, afterwards.
"Sometimes it's just a case of enough is enough, we have to respond, we have to give our supporters something to cheer about. We can't let them down again."
In total, there are nine players in today's match-day panel who were part of that incredible glut of underage success - Kelly, O'Donnell, Duggan, Cleary, McInerney, Reidy, Morey, Paul Flanagan from the 2012-14 team and Conlon as the sole '09 representative.
In the decade since 2013, they've suffered near misses and a few wide misses.
At last, it's another chance for that 'once-in-a-lifetime' group to further make good on their incredible early promise.
Watch the All-Ireland Hurling Championship final, Cork v Clare, on Sunday from 2.15pm on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player. Follow a live blog on rte.ie/sport and the RTÉ News app and listen to commentary on RTÉ Radio 1
