When a team or an individual becomes dominant in their sport, the landscape is usually searched with increasing desperation for a credible opponent to mount a feasible challenge.
It is an ancient question, born of a fundamental desire to keep the sport competitive: is there someone out there who can realistically depose the champion? Anyone at all?
With the Dublin Gaelic football team, we may have to resort not to flesh-and-blood opponents in the shape of Kerry, Tyrone or Mayo, but to something far more abstract and conceptual. Could history itself be the enemy that beats them?
The game’s modern history tells us that the three-in-a-row has become an Everest for even the best teams. It has not been completed since the greatest team of all time signed off with the treble in 1986. And, as we know, that Kerry team was famously denied a five-in-a-row by Offaly and Séamus Darby in 1982.
In the 35 years since, the championship has become more competitive, more demanding, more egalitarian. Many teams are preparing with the levels of seriousness which in that era were only reached by Dublin, Kerry and Offaly. There are more games to play, more occasions in which teams can be weakened through injury or suspension, and a much wider array of coaching personnel with the ability to plot the downfall of a leading contender.
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One could argue that a three-in-a-row would be equal in stature and achievement to a four-in-a-row from a past era. In almost every decade until the 1990s, one team managed to win three All-Irelands back-to-back. In the 1890s and 1900s it was Dublin; in the 1910s it was the legendary Wexford side of 1915-18; in the 1920s it was Dublin again and in the early 1930s, Kerry.
Kerry again won three on the bounce from 1939 to 1941. No team managed it in the 1950s. In the 1960s it was Galway and in the next decade Kerry swept the boards between 1978 and 1981. This historic pattern, almost 100 years old by then, ended with that three-in-a-row lap of honour by those ageing boys of summer from the Kingdom in 1986.
Obviously, then, this has been the longest period in Gaelic football history without a three-on-the-trot side. Kerry, again, came agonisingly close with that brilliant team of the 2000s. Winners in 2004, 2006 and 2007, they were raging hot favourites to complete the triptych in 2008, only to be outwitted by Mickey Harte on the sideline and out-willed by his Tyrone team on the field. Kerry rallied again to win in 2009, making it three out of four, and four out of six, but not the cherished three back to back.
It has become an exceptionally difficult thing to do. Something somewhere always goes wrong, perhaps a ghost in the machine that they do not notice until it is too late. The great enemy within, of course, is a blunt appetite, satiated by previous triumphs. And coming from without is usually a team or two that is ravenous, their appetite sharpened into a lethal blade.
Jim Gavin, Dublin’s manager, shows every sign that he is well aware of these pitfalls. He knows his history, he knows the stats of the past 30 years, he knows the scope of the challenge and the scale of the prize. A three-in-a-row in 2017 puts his team on Mount Rushmore. They are there already but another All-Ireland this year and they would enter a special pantheon.
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Acutely conscious that they just about fell over the line last year, needing that replay to beat Mayo in the final, Gavin’s priority this year has been to keep them fresh. The team went on holiday to Jamaica in January, when normally the All-Ireland winners would be back from vacation and gearing up for the season ahead. They cantered through the league and were not unduly upset when Kerry surprised them in the final. This was April; Gavin was thinking about August. And after the national league was over, the Dublin players went back to their clubs and took a month or more out from collective training.
In addition, he has been infiltrating young talent and fresh legs into the starting XV and from the bench. Con O’Callaghan, 21, stole the show against Kildare on Sunday with his 12 points, six from play. There is a buzz too about rising stars Shane Carthy and Brian Howard, both of whom saw some second half action. Niall Scully has also been bedding down in the half-forward line.
The manager, therefore, is not standing still with the old reliables of the past seven years. His team is evolving on the hoof and they are cultivating exactly the climate he wants on the training ground. He is making the veterans, all of them decorated with medals and All-Stars, fight for their places. Bernard Brogan, for example, looked every inch the jilted superstar when he came off the bench some 10 minutes before half-time on Sunday. He shot the lights out and he wants his place back. He was patently a man on a mission.
Dublin conceded 1-17, their worst leakage in Leinster since 2009. Kildare opened them up for a few more goal chances, too. Anyone looking for chinks in the champions’ armour, which is just about everyone, will be holding this stat up to the light.
The danger is that opposition managers might end up clutching at straws. Dublin were missing Jonny Cooper, one of their defensive pillars. And the team switched off after they scored their second goal in 90 seconds. The game was just 12 minutes old but already they knew the result was done and dusted. Kildare outscored them 0-9 to 0-4 in the last 15 minutes of the first half. Gavin presumably pointed out this fall-off at the interval. Duly galvanised, they put the match to bed in the third quarter.
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He will not ignore the 1-17, but right now it is only looking like fine print in a bigger story. Dublin have not got serious yet this season. They are about to do so; August and the knockouts are looming. The real confrontation with history is imminent.