The inter-county hurling season is entering its - arguably all-too-brief - bonanza period.
This is usually a time of great giddiness and celebration, when gushing superlatives flow freely. However, simultaneously, it is also a time of rancour and complaint.
Some aficionados are unable to fully savour the riches of the Munster championship, so conscious are they of the realisation that it'll be over far too soon.
Which appears to heighten their frustration that they have to (mis)spend these few precious weeks looking at Gaelic football on the television.
Some have decided that they aren't prepared to take it anymore.
Tipperary legend Michael 'Babs' Keating went further than anyone this week when he again floated the suggestion that the hurling fraternity should consider seceding from the GAA altogether.
"Even after turning 81 this week, I have not given up hope of seeing the day when hurling counties decide to plough their own furrow," wrote Babs in his Sun column.
"The game has been saving the GAA for too long without receiving much in return. Surely the time for hurling counties to run their own affairs is nearly upon us."
We had visions of a breakaway hurling super league, with Babs emerging as the Florentino Perez of the venture.
Perhaps a late-night bombshell statement being released jointly by the five Munster SHC counties, plus Kilkenny and Galway, announcing their intention to break away from the association.
Accompanied by the disclosure that they had already agreed a TV deal with Netflix or Amazon or, failing that, Clubber.ie (presumably they'd have to agree to drop the paywall, which might be a sticking point).
We even had a brief check of Google to see whether Kerry Packer was still alive and could muscle in on the project.
The GAA are presumably sanguine that such a schism will not be on the agenda anytime soon.
The great man has been known to shoot from the lip on occasion, a tendency which has, in the past, prompted the Tipperary county board to take the ultimate step and withhold All-Ireland final tickets from him.
It's a well established trope in hurling folklore that approximately 90% of Tipperary's hurling defeats in the 1980s and 1990s are attributed to loose talk from Babs in the lead-up.
But the belief that hurling should strike out on its own is a sincerely held one, which the 'barefooted wonder' has voiced before.
In a 2020 interview with the Irish Times, Babs called for hurling to break with Croke Park, citing football's dominance in terms of votes at Congress.
The extent to which trends in football have impacted its brother code has been wrestled with before.
The Irish Times' Sean Moran wondered aloud in the early rounds of the league whether hurling would remain untouched by the manic bout of reformist zeal seizing Gaelic football. History suggested it might not, he argued, instancing the rules around dissent as ones that could transfer across.
One suspects there are plenty of hurling folk that would instinctively recoil at the notion.
The fact that football was in the process of boldly re-configuring the entire sport on the fly might have encouraged the more defiant hurling types to lean even harder into the status quo, to which they've always been partial.
The best example of hurling's reflexive aversion to change is the fact that the elite hurling counties - which would form the vanguard of Babs' breakaway grouping - largely voted against the current, wildly acclaimed championship format when it came to a vote in 2017, which only passed on the strength of votes from uninterested football counties who were doing what they were told by Central Council.
Still, the imperialist influence of football-orientated folk is widely resented. Nowhere more than in the area of refereeing.
"As evidenced throughout the league, there are non-hurling people in Croke Park pushing referees to implement rules that are not fit for purpose," Babs wrote.
This is a long-standing narrative.
Pat McEnaney was pegged as a sort of George Soros-style bogeyman for the hurling community during his stint as chairman of the National Referees Committee, in which he oversaw both codes.
Back in the 2010s, it was often claimed that the leading hurling refs of the era - your Gavins, your Kellys - would happily have left their whistle and cards in the dressing room were it not for the forbidding presence of McEnaney's henchmen - aka, the assessors - sitting above in the stand, ominously jotting down notes like a wary driving tester.
In a similar vein, Babs was inclined to blame all the nameless football-minded apparatchiks in the background for Sean Stack's card-tastic refereeing display in the Kilkenny-Tipperary game in Nowlan Park.
Not that there was anything new about the national league rules crackdown, which has become something of an annual staple in the hurling league.
The refs go into conclave and isolate one week wherein they will try to put manners on everyone, to lay down a marker for the year ahead.
This invariably triggers a moral panic among the traditionalists and grizzled ex-players, who are in a permanent state of high alert about the game turning soft.
As ever, the only thing necessary for the triumph of softness is for hard men to say nothing.
Eddie Keher, from his perch in the stand, will shake his head ruefully and note that everyone should have backed his campaign to abolish cards when they had the chance.
Sylvie Linnane might emerge to say he can only stomach watching camogie these days on account of its greater physicality.
Some Kilkenny stalwart from the 2000s with a cabinet full of All-Ireland medals will come forward to offer the county's official view, namely, that red cards should only be issued in the most rare and exceptional of circumstances, if at all. Akin to rugby union in the amateur days, when a player was sent off, on average, once a decade.
In rare cases, the odd intellectual dissident might swim against the tide and endorse the lurch into 'law and order' officiating - usually an ex-Cork player, probably a knacky corner-forward from JBM's late 90s team.
And of course, the powerful pedants from the football side of the house - 'the other' - may cop some of the blame for ruining hurling with their health and safety fixations.
In most cases, the let-it-flow brigade needn't worry. By the time the provincial series rolls around, the crackdown is a distant memory and the refs have dutifully gone back to giving the masses what they want. The corner-back assassin's creed is back as the guiding principle - nothing is a free, everything is permitted.
After a quiet spring in which the new-fangled form of football hogged a disproportionate amount of the limelight, last Sunday afternoon's fare provided a nirvana for hurling people, with more to come in the coming weeks.
They'll have to savour it for as long as it lasts.
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