PATRICK'S DAY AT LAST?

Horgan on brink of finally reaching the holy grail after a legendary career in the red of the Rebels

- ROY CURTIS

FROM Patrick Horgan, the official line is that his epic Championship voyage has never felt like an exercise in frustration, all those years without an All Ireland not once perceived as a hike across an endless Championship desert.

Cork's hurling Methuselah, its beloved crown prince, can be entirely forgiven what is, of course, his great white lie.

Undeniably, a major element of the Rebel patriarch's remarkable longevity comes from a place of love.

As Hoggie details his enduring passion for the game (“I'm still playing because I love it, I'm still obsessed with it.”), he might be Romeo composing and ode to Juliet.

Listening to him, softly spoken yet intense, an engaging figure of both substance and authenticity, his passion for the sport that has gifted him a lifelong theatre of self-expression is tangible.

The dopamine surge that washes over him when, having dialled in the coordinates, he propels his millionth sliotar like one more flaming missile towards its target, resembles a storm that declines, even in his 38th year, to blow itself out.

As he told his former teammate Donal Og Cusack in a lovely, intimate 2024 RTE inter view that shone a light on how the game continues to consume him.

"I love having my hurl in my hand. In the off season, I'd go to the alley for three hours a day.

"Then when it comes to matches, it is the most exciting thing you can do. Just being out on the field, the crowd are all there, you are after putting in all the work, you didn't skip anything, you put it all out there, you put your neck on the line basically. And you get a feeling out there that will just never be matched."

As with Padraig Harrington and golf, hurling's Cupid's arrow hit the bull's eye with Horgan.

But, but, but...