It was when the referee was hit by a sizeable lump of the Burren as he was about to blow for kick-off at Terenure that Kevin Myers and fellow spectators knew that there were going to be three teams on the pitch: St Gerard's First XV, King's Hospital First XV, and the Beaufort First XV, as represented by a hurricane from the west.
The referee got up, removed some limestone terracing and a few rare orchids from his hair, and put the whistle to his mouth. The Beaufort XV blew just a little harder than he did, and a moment later he had a musical gizzard. No doubt nature will take its course, and in a day or so the whistle will depart from his body. In the meantime, breaking wind promises to provide some interesting melodic effects.
Another whistle was found, and the ball was kicked off diagonally; but it then rose up vertically, and exited the pitch over the try-line of the team that had kicked off. A fresh-kick off was arranged, but only after various parts of what appeared to be the Blaskets were cleared from one of the team's 25-yard area (no metric here, thank you very much). The kicker shrewdly put a grubber along the deck, and the ball travelled the requisite distance for the game to be considered under way.
I am not an expert on the rules of rugby, and have long since abandoned any attempt to understand the laws of scrummaging, rucking and mauling, which were devised by a little Chinese electronics expert who found designing code-breaking computers too ludicrously simple. But even he never got round to deciding what the referee should do when a player with the ball is dispossessed by a flying porpoise, which is what happened in the second minute. It was, of course, another Beaufort intervention in the game.
King's Hospital - to which I admit a certain partiality: a quarter of the pack are family friends - were pinned back in the final three feet of their half by the combined efforts of the Gerard's boys and the Beaufort aerial beef. It's hard to play in the teeth of a gale which, if it used dental floss, could remove large fragments of Tipperary - the Rock of Cashel for one - from between its molars. But the King's Hos boys are nothing if not plucky, and a ferocious kick from their out-half should have seemed like return fire to Co Tipperary; instead, the ball was grasped in mid-air by the boys of Beaufort, and then firmly lodged in the branches of a pollarded willow alongside the pitch.
Another ball was found for the line-out, which, assisted by the intervention of the Beaufort boys, was won by the full-back 30 yards away. He kicked for a long touch, but this second ball was again plucked from the intended trajectory and planted in the self-same tree, just a few feet away from the first ball. There are scores of trees which have spent their entire, ball-less lives lingering hopefully around Terenure rugby pitch, and none of them had ever before caught a ball. This one had captured two in a minute.
A third ball was found. There was another line-out, another melee, another kick for touch; and yes, the third ball ended up in exactly the same tree, which now looked as if it were growing strange, angular fruit. And, here, I agree, you have no reason to believe any of this actually happened, other than this column's rather austere and puritanical reputation for telling the unvarnished, unadorned truth. But it's all true, believe me.
Now, no rugby rule-book that I know of has ever legislated for an epidemic of salicaceous larceny. Three balls should really be enough to see a match through to the final whistle. However, a fourth ball was obtained, from God knows where - possibly that place where the referee hopes to find his whistle in the next day or so. Another line-out, another kick for touch, but this time the ball evaded the greedy clutches of the willow and landed in the garden beyond, wherein a family of Rottweilers were apparently being given lessons in people-eating by the German cannibal Armin Meiwes. Auf Wiedersehen, fourth ball.
It was here that the referee came into his own. For he found a fifth and final ball with which to play the game. Had the willow gobbled that up, then the match would have been played with a virtual ball in a far from virtual wind, which - incredibly - then intensified. King's Hos were arrayed along their try-line like a layer of belligerent molecules, but neither the wind nor St Gerard's could break through.
Then the reverse happened: KH pushed their way up field, the ball reached their full-back, Paul Donavan, and swift as a scythe cutting hay, he broke through the Beaufort effect and the Gerry defences. Killian Lett, whose formidable boot had been largely responsible for festooning the willow with rugby balls, converted; and then it was half-time.
Common decency does not permit me to describe in detail the second half, when the Beaufort effect was on KH's side. More wind, more tries, more conversions. Dear me, even a punch or two, as the teenage crowd jumped up and down, shrieked their war cries and banged their drums: hormonopolis. The result was 30-0. The KH wing-forward and defensive hero, Ben Cunningham knew nothing of it, having been (innocently, I gather) laid out cold.
Schools rugby is quite wonderful: sport at its purest and most uncynical.