Not for the first time, the final round of the Leinster hurling championship presents us with some delicious and wacky possibilities.
If Offaly do manage to pull away from Kildare - no guarantee, especially given how competitive the latter have been at home - and attention turns to events in Parnell Park, we could be treated to the novel spectacle of a crowd of lads from Birr and Kilcormac striking up an impromptu chant of 'COME. ON. YOU. BOYS. IN. BLUE' from the terrace in Newbridge.
Perhaps if they were really getting into the spirit of it, they could adopt a Dublin accent for the afternoon that's in it and roar stuff like 'Get on 'Hedgo', for f*** sake!' into their phones.
An Offaly victory this weekend, combined with a Dublin win over Kilkenny in the simultaneous game would, incredibly, send Johnny Kelly's side through to the All-Ireland series at the Cats' expense.
That would surely be a landmark moment, given the depths to which Offaly hurling had sunk in the past decade.
In those years, Offaly had stopped regarding themselves as Kilkenny's competitors in any real sense and had even begun to adopt a tone of admiring deference - sometimes described as 'Stockholm syndrome' - towards the Cody-era Kilkenny team.
It wasn't uncommon to hear Offaly hurling folk talk in fawning terms about Kilkenny and (unofficially) supporting them as Leinster's standard bearers in All-Ireland finals against the likes of Tipperary.
This year, after avoiding defeat against Kilkenny in the championship for the first time since the 1998 All-Ireland final, they have a chance to nab third spot in the table and help eliminate KK at the provincial stage for the first time under the current format.
Despite its reputation as the ugly twin sibling - the 'idiot brother sent off to the priesthood' - of the hurling championship, Leinster has in fact a stronger record of producing final-day drama than its glamorous counterpart down south.
Never was this more evident than in the 2019 Leinster championship, which concluded with the Galway backroom team huddled over a mobile phone in the dugout in Parnell Park, watching helplessly as Lee Chin's late free secured a draw between Wexford and Kilkenny, the only result which could have ended the westerners' summer. (Joe Canning claimed in a press call later on that he didn't twig that Galway were out until he had gotten changed and left the dressing room, underlining once again that players pay no heed to permutations).
Offaly weren't involved in any of that. The early summer of 2019 was the one where Offaly hurling really bottomed out.
A year earlier, when it dawned on people that Offaly were about to be relegated and excluded from the Leinster hurling championship, there were a flurry of eleventh hour appeals for clemency and for structural tweaks that would keep them at the top table.
These were slapped down with some glee by Ger Loughnane on The Sunday Game, who flatly insisted that Joe McDonagh was "their level".
This judgement began to look a touch generous the following summer when Offaly lost all four games in the McDonagh Cup and descended to the third tier of championship hurling. And it took them two attempts to emerge from the Christy Ring.
Offaly had enjoyed a period of respectability in the late 2000s and early 2010s, under the managerial reigns of Joe Dooley and Ollie Baker.
They dumped Limerick - previous year's All-Ireland finalists - out of the 2008 championship. They beat Wexford in Leinster in 2012.
In between, they had taken Galway to the brink in the 2010 Leinster semi-final, losing by only two points after a replay. Indeed, they might have won the first day after a Shane Dooley point effort was contentiously ruled wide on the Canal End side, with no Hawkeye available to intervene.
In 2013, they even gave a faltering Kilkenny an uncomfortable afternoon in Tullamore, before going down by a creditable five points.
It was the summer after that when the Offaly senior hurlers really took a nosedive. Their 2014 Leinster opener - and closer - against Kilkenny was a grim day.
It was also the first championship game broadcast on Sky Sports, when Mike from Bolton 'took to Twitter' to express bemusement at this sport he had chanced across while channel-hopping of a Saturday afternoon.
Mike from Bolton can't have been too impressed by Offaly's display that day. Nor was Loughnane, who took a fairly lurid pop at the Offaly players', ahem, conditioning that same year.
Kilkenny hit five goals and won by 26 points, marking a somewhat inauspicious start to the GAA's 'Live on Sky Sports!' era.
There were numerous indignities that were to follow. Laois knocked them out of the provincial championship in 2015.
In 2016, Offaly were slaughtered by Westmeath in Leinster's pre-knockout round-robin phase.
There was no great mystery behind it. It was a case of their ruinously poor underage record coming home to roost.
By the time of their relegation from Liam MacCarthy in the first round-robin season, they hadn't beaten Kilkenny, Wexford or Dublin at minor level since 2005. Their last win over any of that trio at Under-21 level was against Dublin in 2008.
One fatalistic interpretation was that it was in fact Offaly's glory days that were the aberration - rather than their struggles in the 2010s. Donal Óg Cusack pointed out around this time that all of Offaly's championship successes were squashed into the final two decades of the 20th century, beginning with the 1980 Leinster title. That the early 21st century had just seen a violent reversion to the mean.
Various committees were set up to examine the dearth of players coming through, headed up by first Diarmuid Healy and then Liam Hogan.
The county board, as stubborn as they were sclerotic, pretended not to hear any of their recommendations and pointedly ignored them. It was only after the Westmeath loss in 2016 that Hogan's report was leaked to the media in order to pressurise the county board, leading to some partial implementation.
Michael Duignan's election as county board chairman in 2019 is certainly regarded by most observers as transformative. The PGA Tour moolah arriving courtesy of the county's major champion Shane Lowry has been a huge boost.
In the midst of the otherwise dire summer of 2019, the county's U20 side pulled off a big win over Dublin in the Leinster championship.
It was the minor team that reached the All-Ireland final in 2022 - only to lose in agonising fashion - that first caught the imagination. Seven of those that started that final have featured in Offaly's Leinster campaign this year - Liam Hoare, Ter Guinan, Brecon Kavanagh, Shane Rigney, Conor Doyle, Dan Ravenhill and Adam Screeney.
Another graduate from that crop, Donal Shirley, would be playing but for injury. Two years later, most of that crop, plus the stellar Dan Bourke, were part of the team that beat Tipperary to win the county's first U20/21 All-Ireland title.
To a great extent, it is this fairly narrow age cohort that has powered much of the revival. Their record at minor level post-2022 is none too hectic.
However, Duignan and others have been quick to pay tribute to the elder crop on the team, who soldiered away during the bleak times, such as Ben Conneelly and Eoghan Cahill.
Cahill was Offaly's chief marksman during the Christy Ring years and missed a penalty in their shock loss to Down in 2020. In the last two weekends, he's scored 0-15 and 1-12 respectively as Offaly drew with Kilkenny and beat Wexford.
It could have been an even better scenario for them this weekend. Galway's accident-prone defeat to Dublin took Offaly's fate out of their own hands to a great degree. They are dependent on Dublin doing something they've rarely done and beating Kilkenny.
Though it's a very plausible outcome on Sunday that Offaly are the ones progressing to the last six of the All-Ireland championship - something that would have been deemed a pipe dream some years ago.
Watch a provincial hurling double-header, Dublin v Kilkenny (2pm) and Cork v Clare (4pm), on Sunday from 1.30pm on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player. Follow our live blog on RTÉ.ie/sport and RTÉ News app and listen to Sunday Sport on RTÉ Radio 1
Watch The Sunday Game from 9.30pm on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player. Follow a live blog on all matches on the RTÉ News app and on rte.ie/sport
