After last year, the Galway hurlers now have 15 Leinster championships under their belt.
In their early years in the province, the Leinster title may have been merely a means to an end. Their participation simply an effort to put a coherent shape on their season, bringing them in line with the rest of the Liam MacCarthy contenders.
Feelings might have evolved since then though.
The spectre of Limerick looming over the entire championship has added a greater urgency to the Leinster championship for the competing counties.
As a result, Galway, an interloper in the province in historical terms, may now be seeing the Bob O'Keeffe in a newly shimmering light.
Perhaps their best chance at silverware. Recent agonising defeats have sharpened this sentiment.
The visible devastation in the seconds after last year's provincial decider was the strongest evidence yet that Galway are now fully emotionally invested in the Leinster SHC.
Back in the autumn of 2008, in the same week that the country guaranteed the banks and the late Sean Fitzpatrick was telling the also late Marian Finucane that he couldn't apologise "with any degree of sincerity", Galway and Antrim were welcomed into the Leinster hurling championship.
'Welcomed' might be pushing it. Most of the counties impacted opposed their entry, including very nearly Galway themselves.
Offaly were opposed. Wexford voted against the idea "overwhelmingly".
The Dublin county board also rejected Galway's arrival, though in a telling indication of their thinking, they had no problem with Antrim coming into the fold.
GAA President Nickey Brennan, pursuing the plan with the fervour of a legacy project, branded the dissenting Leinster counties "selfish".
At a fraught Galway county board meeting, nearly all the senior officials and administrators were hostile.
The old-timers who remembered the county's unhappy stint in the Munster championship in the 1960s were the most staunchly opposed.
Only two of the 11 speakers at the Galway meeting voted in favour, the secretary John Fahy and players representative David Collins. In the end, they won over the delegates by a wafer-thin majority.
Kilkenny were the one elite Leinster hurling county to vote in favour, despite the vocal opposition of a couple of players who were canvassed in the media. This has since been hailed as an example of Kilkenny's manly and sporting confidence, though their vote in favour had as much to do with Brennan's role as an evangelist and county board chair Ned Quinn's involvement with the Hurling Development Committee.
In an interview with Newstalk following the Salthill handshake unpleasantness, Aidan 'Taggy' Fogarty surmised that Brian Cody likely took a dim view of the whole Galway-in-Leinster business. And an even dimmer view of the idea of Galway winning Leinster.
"(Cody) he'd be a traditionalist, he'd be old school," said Fogarty.
A number of other Leinster counties did support Galway's entry into the province on what we might describe as the 'makes-no-odds-to-us-either-way' principle.
It was in many respects similar to the vote on the current much-lauded championship structure back in late 2017, in that its passage rested on the votes of those with no skin in the game. The Gaelic football crowd may be forever tinkering, but when it comes to hurling votes at Congress, the status quo is never short of backers.
A decade and a half later and Galway's Leinster title haul of three feels fairly underwhelming. It would have been a more acceptable number had Kilkenny remained the reigning power in the game for the whole of the period. But KK are without an All-Ireland title since 2015, their longest barren run since 1983-92.
They won their first Leinster crown, out of nowhere, in 2012, when Kilkenny still ruled the roost. Deploying an early version of the occasional Limerick tactic of withdrawing their half-forwards back to the half-back-line, they dominated the Kilkenny puckout. The champions weren't then accustomed to this sort of tactical jiggery-pokery and were slow to adapt, famously trailing 2-11 to 0-01 after a surreal opening half hour.
The celebrations afterwards were a mixture of straightforward euphoria at beating Kilkenny and an air of amused exultation at the notion of lifting another province's provincial title.
Still there were grumbles over the years. Mattie Murphy, two-time senior manager and the procurer of several thousand minor medals for the county, recommended they bid sayonara to Leinster in late 2014, protesting the lack of home games and arguing they had simply "fattened" their rivals coffers.
This talk quietened by 2017 when Micheál Donoghue's imperious side won every trophy on offer. The Bob O'Keeffe was very clearly a stepping stone to bigger things that summer. Their opponents Wexford, in a first provincial final since 2008, had a much stronger hankering for the Leinster crown for its own sake and, not for the first or last time in a Leinster final, the crowd from the west found themselves heavily outnumbered.
For their last Leinster title win in 2018, the geographical integrity of the competition took a further battering as Galway not only won the final replay over Kilkenny - but did so in Semple Stadium. The introduction of the round robin that summer ended the grievance around home games, though Pearse Stadium didn't exactly present its best self to the world for its first Leinster SHC game, one side of the pitch being badly cut up by an Ed Sheeran concert.
The week of the 2022 Leinster final, Joe Canning wrote in his Irish Times article that he didn't care a whole pile for his three Leinster medals. Certainly, he didn't cherish them in a way that Lee Chin might his own one.
Has the comparative lack of motivation contributed to Galway winning fewer provincial titles than they should have?
Somewhat gallingly, they have let a comparatively mediocre Kilkenny side - by the county's historical standards rather than in comparison to the rest of the sport - win four provincial titles on the bounce.
The westerners' failure to win the 2020 Leinster decider will have been particularly baffling to anyone called away from the TV with 10 minutes remaining.
For most of the match, Galway were the better team to the tune of six or seven points until the introduction of Richie Hogan - even then, regarded as a ghost of All-Irelands past - who turned the game with a comically ingenious goal. Cody's commitment to Covid regulations was such that he kept on his Kilkenny branded mask through the pre and post match interviews.
The 2022 Leinster final was possibly one of the worst big matches played in the 21st century. Those in the Cusack Stand had the dipping evening sun to thank for the fact that they barely saw much of it. It was as if the cagey, stop-start intro to a game had been elongated to cover the entire 70 minutes. There was barely more than 12 seconds of continuous action.
Kilkenny, after losing two matches in the round robin, wound up cantering away with the Leinster title in what turned out to be Cody's last season.
Then came the shocking last-gasp defeat in 2023. The Galway backs' exhausted attempts, down in the corner of the Hogan and Davin Stands, to hoike the ball skywards and thus prompt the final whistle are still the stuff of nightmares. Leinster was never the holiest of grails for Galway but you wouldn't have guessed in the immediate aftermath of the final whistle.
The annual orgy of giddy self-congratulation that accompanies the Munster hurling championship may also furthered their integration in the province, the Leinster SHC sides bonded together in an increasing shared resentment.
Shefflin's performance as Galway manager has been regarded as about 'par'. They have finished top of the Leinster round-robin in both seasons - not that this counted very much after each provincial final.
They've recovered well to win two All-Ireland quarter-finals and soften the cough of the Munster hurling chauvinists by beating Cork and Tipperary respectively. Against Limerick in both semis, the portcullis came down, much more emphatically in the second year than the first.
Those observers hostile to Galway are promoting the narrative that Shefflin, whose status as an unimpeachable 'winner' isn't likely to be altered at this stage, is finding himself perplexed by the mentality on display out west - I believe 'flaky' is the favoured cliche. In this telling, unless they can plonk down some silverware in front of him soon - the Leinster trophy being the likeliest candidate - then he'll be off.
They remain as heavily caricatured as ever. On Hill 16 during last year's All-Ireland final, one Limerick supporter spent the half-time period darkly warning that Kilkenny "weren't Galway" and thus they could be in for a difficult ride. Then Kilkenny proceeded to lose by nine points - exact same margin as the semi-final - and it transpired they weren't that different to Galway after all.
History indicates that the outcome of Sunday's game will be of limited consequence. Donal Óg, in his Hurling Nation slot, has prosephied a "lively bout of shadow-boxing" and wasn't interested in offering a prediction beyond that. We're not that far removed from the national league and its series of high budget challenge matches.
Galway have yet to lose to Kilkenny in the Leinster round robin, winning in 2018, 2019 and 2022, and snatching a draw in Nowlan Park last year. In only one of those seasons did Galway win Leinster (2018) and they had to overcome Kilkenny again to do so.
The combination of home venue, Galway's strongest XV and the injuries to Eoin Cody, Adrian Mullen and Eoin Murphy have made Shefflin's side favourites for Sunday's game, though it'll count for little if they don't add silverware later on.
In the age of Limerick supremacy, the Bob O'Keeffe is the best way for Shefflin to demonstrate progress.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
