THIS IS BETTER THAN ANY F***ING ALL IRELAND

Dingle win was manna from' heaven for Kerry legend Griffin

- Roy CURTIS

EVEN for one of Kerry's highly decorated boys of summer, one whose lapels drip with summer battle ribbons, last weekend triggered a tsunami of feelings unlike anything he had known before.

The things that sit deepest in the heart, an invigorating, hard-to-explain sense of place and togetherness, the music of identity, relief, all these things washed over Tommy Griffin as his home town was transformed into a bazaar of joy.

Griffin places inestimable value on the treasure house of five Celtic crosses his days as a county man yielded, yet on an October Sunday that destiny finally sought out Dingle, he found himself nodding as a delirious, well-oiled neighbour roared in his ear.

"He kept saying to me, 'this is better than any All-Ireland, better than any f***ing All-Ireland."

Griffin saw old men in the hours after Dingle ended their 77-year wait for a county title who were younger than if they had time travelled back to their prime, the emotion of the day peeling the decades from their faces.

An important and invigorating cultural moment in time, the madcap days that follow the autumnal season of county finals evoke a line from the Australian writer, Richard Flanagan: "Without love what was the world. Just objects, things, light, darkness."

In an age of rural depopulation, as the dark winter days take a grip, here is football as a vehicle to a higher realm, a warming blanket wrapped around an entire community. The vitamin of place nourishing a tribe, a town.

"It's in the blood, it's who we are," says Griffin, a key figure in the backroom, his telltale hoarseness offering a window to a marathon Monday celebration that pleasantly lubricated a body that was arid after three dry months.