Patrick Horgan enters the room, gearbag slung over his shoulder, holding a hurl and sliotar in his hands. He drops his bag on the ground but places the stick and ball on the table in front of him. They are like an extension of his body, it is hard to imagine him without either.
This is Horgan’s 17th season playing for the Cork senior hurlers. He has made 82 championship appearances and scored 29-617 (704), which currently leaves him second behind TJ Reid 34-604 (706) in the list of all-time top championship scorers.
Horgan is 36 now and one of only three survivors from Cork’s 2013 All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship final defeat to Clare – along with Séamus Harnedy and Conor Lehane. He was there in 2021 too when the Rebels lost the decider to Limerick.
A Celtic Cross has remained out of reach and there is a temptation for media and analysts to frame this final around that narrative – perhaps Horgan’s last chance to win an All-Ireland medal. But the man himself has a different take on it all.
“Honestly, and I’m not saying it because I’m in the position, but it’s actually not even close to that for me,” says Horgan.
“I’m not aiming 17 years towards one day. I’ve had good days down through the years and the amount of stories you’d have from match days and training. Seventeen years of my life has been coming here, hanging out with the boys, new fellas coming in, getting to know them, becoming great friends. That means a lot to me.
“Obviously, it’d be unbelievable if we could get across the line, but it can’t be just about that. Do you know what I mean?
“In your hurling career, it’s lovely to get it and everybody wants to have it and I’m no different. But I’d look over a long time and did I enjoy it or didn’t enjoy it? And I did.”
There were times, though, when Horgan admits he was perhaps too obsessive about the game – to the extent that to protect him from overtraining, county and club officials would attempt to curtail his time out on the pitch.
“Early on when I started playing with Cork, I was here on the pitch at five o’clock and we’d be training at seven. We’d have a two-hour session, so I’d be on the field for four hours and you’d be worn out,” Horgan says.
“One-hundred per cent, early on I definitely did too much. I wasn’t listening. I was barred from the pitch and everything for a while, they wouldn’t open the gates. Remember the old Páirc, the two big red gates? They’d be closed. Not a hope were we going out.
“Paudie Sull was the same. Barred out of the Glen field as well. Then the game started changing and we started thinking differently. Training routines changed, it’s not all about the time you put in, it’s the quality time.”
And even though he has improved on that front, there is no doubt the game still consumes him, he thinks about hurling a lot.
“Visualising things that could happen or things that will happen, how to get better, technique, everything,” Horgan says.
“If I’m walking down the street, if I’m with a buddy, I’ll walk away from them and think about something. But they know at this stage, if I go quiet or anything, they know what I’m doing.”
Eleven years ago, he was seconds away from becoming the man who scored the winning point in the 2013 All-Ireland final. However, Domhnall O’Donovan’s incredible last-gasp equaliser earned Clare a draw, and the Banner won the replay.
“No, don’t give me that, he was too far up the pitch,” smiles Horgan when asked if O’Donovan was meant to be marking him at the time the Clare defender fired over the leveller.
“The only thing I can remember was it must’ve been something that was supposed to happen, because [it was] a sequence of play where five or six things happened and if one thing happened differently, the game was over.
“It just kept seeming to break for them. A handpass going to ground, a couple of things happened like that, and then the striking, one of our fellas went for a hook or a block and just missed and it went over the black spot.”
So much has changed in the years since. Horgan is a dad now to two-year-old Jack, but the four-time All Star says the outcome of Sunday’s All-Ireland final will have no impact on whether or not he returns to the Cork set-up for 2025.
“I love coming down training, being ready, throwing on the gear, going out. Boys come along, you have a few chats or whatever, that’s what sport is,” Horgan says.
“It’s great to be involved in these big matches and sell-out games but it’s about the people you meet and the days you have with them.”
As he prepares for what will be his 83rd championship appearance, there are far more intercounty games behind Horgan than there are in front of him. But, in advance of his latest All-Ireland final, the fact he is fit and still capable of driving Cork forward is something for which he is thankful.
“You could be flying and then you could pick up a knock, you could be out for three or four months. You might miss the championship then because it came at the wrong time,” he says.
“So, you have to be lucky along the way as well and I have been really lucky, I have to say that.
“When it does come time where I need to stop playing, I was so lucky, so it should be easy for me to give it up, just have a few pucks around. But let’s see.”
Cork have certainly been lucky to have him.
