Waterford's long-running quest to escape the prison of the Munster hurling championship and give themselves a game in June reaches a crunch point this evening.
All their exertions and Stephen Bennett's Player of the Month scoring exploits have yielded one point from four so far.
Their last game is away to Limerick, a team they haven't beaten in the last eight attempts. The evidence of last Sunday is that John Kiely's side don't appear especially vulnerable this summer. That makes this evening's game at home to Cork a must-win.
They're stuck in a perpetual Group of Death, prevented from getting any further, like if Ireland were dumped in with France and the Netherlands for every qualification campaign.
A common refrain among Waterford hurling fans is a yearning to return to the provincial knockout days of yore.
During the Covid years, when the round-robin format was briefly held in abeyance, Waterford roused themselves to reach the All-Ireland final in 2020 and then an All-Ireland semi-final in 2021, where they gave Limerick a tougher game than they got in the decider.
And if you include the last non-Covid championship played under the old format in 2017, then Waterford have reached two of the last three All-Ireland finals in the back-door system.
When the current format was proposed in the autumn of 2017, county chairman Paddy Joe Ryan labelled it as "crazy" and said his delegates were "dismayed" at the changes, so perhaps he foresaw something that others didn't.
Dessie Hutchinson joined those calling for a return of the provincial knockout after picking up his Club Player of the Year award in March, remarking that "as Waterford people, we thrive on knockout hurling."
The Munster Council's financial situation since the introduction of the round-robin format calls to mind the laughing Tony Montana internet meme, so they're unlikely to be receptive to any proposed changes.
Nor, one senses, are the bulk of supporters or players from other teams.
There has been no convincing explanation as to why Waterford performed much better under knockout rules over the last decade than in the provincial league system.
Potentially they don't have the depth to sustain a week-on-week challenge in an era when all four Munster counties have been strong (albeit Tipp have been wildly inconsistent).
Perhaps we're looking at it through too small a sample size. Waterford may have been one of the leading contenders in the 2000s and again in the mid-2010s but that hadn't been the case before that since the early 1960s.
It's not as if they've been uncompetitive or cut adrift in the newer format - at least not since the dismal 2019 campaign, the only season in which they looked badly out of their depth.
The 2022 championship, which they entered as league champions, petered out badly. Liam Cahill's previously successful and promising reign suddenly derailed in the middle of that championship and he was gone soon after.
They turned again to Davy Fitzgerald, who'd guided them to their last Munster title in 2010 but whose own managerial win-loss ratio had taken a nose-dive since winning the All-Ireland with Clare in 2013.
In 2023, their only victory came away to Tipperary, after their chances of progression had gone.
After last year's Munster campaign, which began promisingly with a win at home to Clare, there was a sense that they were close to the end of their tether with it all.
Cutting a frustrated figure, Peter Queally called for some unspecified format change that would enable Waterford to have a better chance of hurling in the month of June.
"We really had set out our stall this year to come out of Munster," Queally said after their loss to Cork.
"We've trained hard for the last eight months in a lot of unkind weather. Just when the weather is getting good, now we're putting our hurleys away. It's very frustrating."
John Kiely, in his pre-Munster final Zoom press conference, expressed sympathy with Waterford's plight but ultimately stressed that it was the cut-throat nature of the Munster SHC that made it what it was.
The question is sometimes posed as to how they'd do in the Leinster championship. Most agree they'd escape it more often than not - and with a fair wind, could possibly win it.
It's occasionally asserted by some of the giddier and more chauvinistic Munster spokespeople that the Munster teams account for the top five teams in the country.
That seems a bit of a stretch. Waterford did lose to both Galway and Kilkenny in Division 1A this year - and were beaten by the former fairly comfortably.
They've been highly competitive and resilient in their two games so far but have only one point to show for it. The six-point margin of defeat was a harsh verdict on their efforts against Clare.
Against Tipp, they gave themselves a fighting chance with a last-gasp goal courtesy of their opponents' casually poor game management.
Three points behind with the seconds running down, a clearance was lamped into Billy Nolan, who played a purposeful one-two before bombing the ball down on top of Stephen Bennett on the edge of the square. A quarter-to-five ball at it used to be known before the Sky takeover of English football.
The ball broke for Kevin Mahony, who found the roof of the net. The relief at the final whistle was tinged with some regret. Less than 10 minutes earlier, Waterford led the game by two points, having reeled in an 11-point half-time deficit.
As often happens when a team completes a mammoth comeback, they lost the momentum as soon as they nudged in front and suddenly had something to protect.
Stephen Bennett, with his dodgy hips, has racked up a whopping 4-22 in this campaign and is playing as well as ever.
They turned over Cork in the Munster opener two years ago, after which it took a famous night in Páirc Uí Chaoimh against Limerick for Pat Ryan's side to rescue themselves.
Though they were beaten in a crucial fixture against the Rebels at the same venue two years before that and any talk of Walsh Park being 'a fortress' is idle, fanciful talk given that championship games were hardly ever played there until the current format took hold.
This time around, they may be a beneficiary of Cork injuries, with changes being forced at full-back and centre-back. Ben O'Connor's team also don't need a result as badly as their hosts.
Against that, Cork's forward firepower is frightening and Waterford have shipped 2-33 and 1-30 in their two fixtures to date.
Bennett, in All-Star form, doesn't share the hostility to the round-robin format of some of his county men.
"I do think it's fair," he told reporters this week. "It's unfortunate that the teams that have won the All-Ireland final the last number of years are all in Munster... it's just about getting through Munster and then it can open up."
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