LOCKER ROOM:Those gold streamers cascading down from the roof of the Hogan yesterday just made a great event look tacky

HERE’S A THING. Last Friday evening starting at 7pm some 27 members of St Mary’s GAA club in Sligo set off to run from Sligo to Croke Park (make up your own jokes about how Sligo people know the way and then read on). They ran a relay system with three on each leg and they reached Croker on Saturday just before 3pm.

Now there are some forms of public transport that wouldn’t get you there that quickly. All along from their town and from people along the way they got incredible support. The runners were made up of players, managers, parents and included former Sligo manager Tommy Breheny.

The whole idea was a little illustration of what the GAA should be about. That spirit of community, of self-sufficiency, of pushing out and being inventive and brave.

From beginning to end the support they received was incredible and when they arrived into Fagan’s of Drumcondra on Saturday evening for a well-deserved sarsparilla or two they looked none the worse for their exertions.

We say they got support from everywhere but that’s not quite true. What hurt them most, well the only thing that hurt them, was that when they got to Croke Park on Saturday afternoon the gates were locked against them.

They just wanted to take a photo. A top of Everest shot. A planting the flag at the pole snap. It’s their GAA and their Croke Park. They are the grassroots which make the association what it is.

Entreaty after entreaty, plea after plea to the high panjandrums of Jones’ Road were turned down, however.

For three months they asked and for three months they were told no. So after 20 hours of running the good GAA people of St Mary’s, Sligo reached Croke Park, stood around for a while and had to turn around and walk away. They’d have got more of a welcome in Lansdowne Road.

I was thinking of them yesterday when the final whistle blew in Croke Park and we went into the sanitised production which is the end-of-the-match malarkey the GAA is so proud of. Those unable to afford the seats were watching like sodden herons from behind Croker’s obscene Hill 16 fencing, wondering what it’s all about.

How they must have longed to be out on the pitch invading and stampeding and pillaging like their fathers and their fathers before them. (It occurs here that had the good people of St Mary’s been let in to Croker on Saturday maybe they’d have stampeded and killed each other and sued the GAA as a fund-raising wheeze. The Association can’t be too careful these days.)

Nobody seriously calls for pitch invasions or stampedes but a couple of thousand people on the pitch certainly used to make for a little bit of atmosphere and fun. Yesterday, those tacky gold streamers cascaded down from the roof of the Hogan for three seconds filling us peasants with awe and wonder but making the event look like the aftermath of a scoreless draw between Birmingham and Stoke City in the Premiership.

Our hearts had scarcely stopped racing after the incredible spectacle which preceded the game of a large flag in the Cork colours and a large flag in the Down colours being carried on to the field and being shaken up and down as if to clear off crumbs. The shaking was done by school children who had to wait on the field so long doing their shaking we almost rang an expert in labour law to inquire about their status.

All this came just after the silent movie which marked the end of the minor game. Croke Park has decided the tradition of the winning minor captain making a speech is unseemly and has canned that plus the annual ramble which we used to get from the bishop handing over the trophy. Instead, culturally unique as we are, we got U2 and The Pogues blasted out over the PA.

Where are we going with all this? Seriously. How much more distance is Croke Park going to put between itself and the people who made the place what it is? We are told that when the committee that meets to discuss such things opted to press the mute button on minor captains everybody there was in favour of shutting the senior captains up also and this eventuality wouldn’t be far down the road.

Soon Mr Marty Morrissey will accept all trophies and make the speeches on behalf of the counties. No requests for songs or ditties will be entertained and all customers shall remain silent and leave in an orderly fashion.

You know I don’t know how many times in a year I have the GAA conversation. You know the one. Where we just sit back and marvel at what an incredible and unique organisation we have on our hands. We talk about how it brings us together, about how the atmosphere at any event from a bitter club game to, say, this month’s All-Ireland hurling final can be like nothing you could experience anywhere on earth.

We talk about the games, the people who play them, we give out about the GAA but we do so with love. It’s in our DNA, it has cradled us and nursed us and carried us in strong arms to this point where it feels like home for us.

And how many times recently have we spoken with regret and sorrow about how it is changing and how alienating the changes feel. We used to fret when the GPA started that a gap would open between the elite of the playing grades and their less gifted comrades back in the clubs. We should have worried about the organisation drifting away from its heart.

Keeping the St Mary’s people outside instead of letting them in to take a photograph, the oppressively symbolic fencing, the campaign to push the Cumann na mBunscol finals out of Croke Park where they have been held since 1928 (every county in the country should be given a day in the place, for God’s sake), the loss this week of Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh’s comforting voice. These are all worrying, perplexing and slightly hurtful things for the grassroots.

Nobody owns the GAA. We have a lease on it. We have borrowed it not from Cusack and Davin and the boys but from our children and our grandchildren and we are obliged to hand it over in better condition than we found it.

There were so many wonderful moments in Croke Park this year and there were millions more on pitches and in clubs around the country but Croke Park feels increasingly sanitised and corporate and those who thought of it as home now go there feeling like customers in a bespoke store.

We don’t want it to be like the Premiership or the Super Bowl when we go. We want it to be brothy and slightly chaotic and trembling with passion and to give us that tingle in the spine, that feeling of Irishness so hard to find in these bad times.

We’ve lost that loving feeling.