Before Christmas 2004, Caltra invited the late Eugene McGee to launch their new book. It was only nine months since they had won the club All-Ireland with a panel of players drawn from eight households and half a parish, but something like that needed to be written down fast, before the story was clouded by memory. Their achievement, McGee said, was one of “outrageous audacity”.

That year the competition reached an apogee of sorts. Caltra, An Gaeltacht, Newtownshandrum and Dunloy, were the teams in Croke Park for the St Patrick’s Day double-header. None of them had ever won an All-Ireland, and only Dunloy had contested a final before. The population of the four places, wrote Vincent Hogan, would fit into “one large housing estate”.

That was the original beauty of the club championship: there was scope for a fairytale and there was room for smallness. This was before the “professionalisation” of the club game at elite level, before the countrywide recruitment of high-profile outside managers, before the club game was flooded with money, and ancillary resources, and notions.

When the provincial club championships begin later this month they will be populated by familiar names. All over the country there are examples of clubs who have taken a grip of their county championships, some of whom are primed to dominate for years to come.

Ballygunner have just completed 12 in a row in Waterford, one title