SIDELINE CUT:The parade of old teams at Croke Park, nostalgic as it is, offers proof that teams remain teams long after their own particular era is over

THE GAA is a stickler for tradition and one ritual that it should never abandon is the parading of old teams during the big-match intervals at Croke Park.

Ten years ago, the feted Dublin team of 1974 were honoured in this fashion and David Hickey removed his jacket to reveal a slogan calling for an end to the Cuban blockade by the USA. The man had not been on the playing field for years but, straight away, he engaged people and stoked the flames of the dormant protest culture.

The Dubs in the crowd that had been children during the glorious era of Kevin Heffernan’s Dublin were fired up all over again. Even for those too young to remember the feats of the 1974 team, it was obvious that that Dublin team was made of radically different characters.

It made sense that a team drawn from a capital city should contain such diverse personalities. Authoritarian, counter-cultural and wiseacre all blended to create a football team that will, it seems clear, never be forgotten by the generation of metropolitans who lived through those days. That particular team seemed to reflect what the city was about: a teeming combination of voices and thoughts and people.

The millennial Dublin is aching for a football team to replicate the feats and melodrama of the 1970s generation. And nobody can deny that, throughout this decade, the Dublin footballers have given the city some great days out.

Summer after summer, they lay their souls at the feet of the ever-jubilant crowd in Hill 16. Sometimes they have been the fall guys on afternoons of gripping drama – against Tyrone in 2005 and Mayo a year later.

But the truth is they are the only team that can make Croke Park seem as if it was built to the correct scale.

The Dubs shrink Croke Park and every other county side wants to play against them because there must be an incomparable sporting thrill for a visiting team to feel, even fleetingly, that they have commanded the Hill to fall silent.

David Hickey’s political gesture should go down as one of the timeless GAA moments, not because it was political or unusual but because it felt spontaneous.

And it underlined the fact that the GAA tradition of gathering teams together for one last parade 20 and 30 and 40 years after their heyday is one that should be cherished. Because the ceremony asks the question common to all sport: when does a team cease to become a team?

Teams, are, by their nature, unnatural constructs.

In Gaelic Games, putting a team together involves merging the personalities and opinions of a large group of players and convincing them to chase down one idea. They may not have much to say to one another outside the game, might not even like one another that much.

For a short, intense period, they lock on to the same ambition and they listen to the same voice and they form a kind of brotherhood and, if they are lucky, they share one or two sporting moments that will always stay vivid. The real power of the GAA lies in the fact that all teams have their place, a permanent place, in its sprawling narrative.

It might be the Kerry football team of the 1970s, still regarded as the nonpareil in the 125 years of the association. But go to any clubhouse or pub in the country and it won’t be long before your eyes fall upon a photograph of a team which was, in its own way, just as important and as powerful in its particular place and time.

It may be a junior team from the late 1970s whose photograph is tucked away in the corner of the Longford Slashers function room. No matter: you will still find someone who can name you every player, tell you their strengths, their weaknesses and the best yarns about them.

Or you could pick almost any game from the highest echelons of the club championship, probably the most gallant of all competitions in the GAA because it combines the best players on the national stage with the very best of the local. All teams have stand-out days. It might be the day they reach the Leitrim county final for the first time. It might be an unexpected run to the final of a club tournament. Or for another team, the shining day might belong to a wind-blown October day in ’94 when Errigal Ciarán were taken on and beaten when Errigal Ciarán were kings of Ulster.

Not every team gets the opportunity to parade around Croke Park, to stand in suits and wave at the crowd. But the famous teams are representative of the vast number of teams that have come and gone down the years and left a behind a small inextinguishable flame. And the ceremony, the parade of old teams, nostalgic as it is, offers proof that teams stay long after the players have scattered in every direction.

All teams break up in a fractured kind of way. Countless sportsmen have remarked upon it down the years: when you are starting out in whatever game you play, it is as if you have a million games before you. Gradually – and then suddenly – they are behind you. There is no definitive announcement. Players retire, they move elsewhere for work, they get injured, they wake up and find that their pace has gone, whatever, the dynamic is broken and almost invisibly, a new team has replaced them and the cycle keeps going.

That is why there is something worthwhile about the GAA tradition of bringing old teams together again, if only for an hour. Because it recognises not just that particular team but the understanding that 10 or 20 or 50 years on, a team is still a team.

And the sequences from its stand-out day somehow manage to transcend time and, even if there is no grainy video recording of the match, it is easy to recall the day they played out of their skins and that so-and-so played a blinder or that another scored 0-9, he couldn’t miss that day, or that the centre back was brave as a lion, always brave as a lion.