Locker Room:Strange summer. Most of it spent in GAA grounds feeling more shivery and sodden than a streaker at a winter league match in Ballinascreen (where lyrically Anthony Rainbow of Suncroft had once to be treated for exposure during a game between Derry and Kildare). It hasn't been a great football championship and the hurling has perked us up considerably without taking away all our worries.

When you're a kid and playing in championships you hear a lot about every round being "our final". In the new contemporary structure of the All-Ireland championships that phrase might as well have a moratorium placed on it until August.

To whittle itself down to a few serious contenders, the football championship goes through the sort of elaborate procedure which an old centralist communist state might have felt the need to streamline.

All those games for so little progress. As the Americans say, it's like burning down the barn to get rid of a few mice.

The football championship has arrived at last though at some interesting scenery. For those of us who peddle feature articles for a living we have two semi-final pairings which provide an excuse for blowing the dust off old contacts books and phoning old codgers to extract thoughts and sentimentalities about life back in their day.

Cork and Meath endured each other's company without affection or respect through the late 80s and I was surprised just now, flicking through Liam Hayes's fine book Out of Our Skins, to notice Colm Coyle missed almost all of that first All-Ireland season of 1987 having fecked off to Chicago.

Why would he have done that I thought? In this era of supposedly enlightened selfishness when players only abandon their teams in summer time because they have been promised a wheelbarrow-full of dollars and a sinecure of a job States-side it seems impossible to imagine a Colm Coyle flitting off to Chicago.

But that was 1987 and, when I thought of it, I was carrying bricks up ladders in London that summer (well ok, maybe half a dozen bricks through the summer season, it was damn hot) and the era when being a decent GAA player in Meath meant instant profile and earning power was still a long time away.

And of course Shane O'Rourke's oul fella, the name will come to me soon, was playing for Meath back then. In Dublin before the mid-80s we as a species had never really been required to consider Meath people with anything other than charity and pity.

But in 1986 they started beating us and have never really stopped doing that for long enough for us to regain our old view of our neighbours as providing us with a sort of safe-petting zoo environment in which we might view the lives of real culchies without actually having to travel to the wilds.

Having been beaten by Meath in 1986 and then again in 1987 and so on we decided we didn't like them much and, as is the form among the anthropologists of the Hill, we decided that beating us regularly at football was ineffable proof that Meath people were our intellectual inferiors.

Eager as I was to be a leading proponent of this notion, my impoverished early freelancing career was spent working, or hoping to be working but not actually working, for the Sunday Tribune.

It was considered good practice back then among starving freelances to spend as much time as possible sitting in the office of the paper to whom you were peddling your bony ass so that when the editor came out of his office and demanded that somebody put a sign in the window saying 'Smart Boy Wanted' you would be on site to save them the trouble of a headhunt.

The old Sunday Tribune though was run and dominated by Vincent Browne, a man so fiery and combustible that sitting around on the desks outside his office was more a form of Russian roulette than career advancement.

It was a matter of amazement to those of us who sat unpaid and cowering back then in the early 90s to see Colm O'Rourke flitting in an out of the editor's office, or pound as we called it behind his back, like some muscled Jay Gatsby.

His every thought and suggestion seemed to be treated with the gravity that Boswell accorded Dr Johnston. We knew back then the difference between Brahmins and the untouchables in the caste-ridden world of sports hackery.

And of course Billy Morgan was in charge of Cork back then, irascible and spikey and possibly the only living being with the key to the psyche of the Cork footballing man.

As for Dublin v Kerry. Surely there's a good book to be written on the 70s rivalry?

If footballing summers have evolved into a test of a decent team's ability to time its own run it is difficult to know what has become of the hurling competition. Waterford lost their first game of the year yesterday and were consigned to the familiar dungeon.

Beaten semi-finalists - a heartbreak made all the more difficult to bear by the thought their summer's work consisted entirely of playing the same two Munster teams. Cork three times and Limerick twice.

Kilkenny, who will be Limerick's opposition in the final, dominate Leinster like a slum lord might rule the ghetto.

Their year has provided tests but their contour has been gentle and it is surely hard to argue at this stage that the hurling structures provide a competition that isn't lopsided.

The mystery is why we tiptoe around the subject or reforming the world's greatest game as if we were involved in a Victorian courtship ritual, why we imagine that things always have to be the same as they always were as a prerequisite to them getting better.

Surely we have learned over the past couple of decades that the games are strong enough a product to survive change? That meaningful matches fill seats and fill imaginations. For all the messing about with Nicky Rackard Cups and Christy Ring Cups why does nobody suggest that some of the finer hurlers from the counties participating in those competitions be given the chance to play in regional selections?

The old provincial championships can still be part of the template for a new hurling season but what elevated yesterday's game between Limerick and Waterford to the heights where the air was thin and the heartbeat crazy was the sense of everything being on the line.

That's the supreme drama of Gaelic games. Waterford's shocking demise, Limerick's heroic, staggering hunger. There could be no purer drama.

My laptop is filled with suggestions and proposals from people for a new shape of hurling championship and for a more distinct and defined season that gives the game back to the club player.

On one level, the game of hurling is rudely healthy at the moment; there is an appetite for playing and watching that seemed unthinkable a generation ago. The primary competition though throws up a wonder that is refracted through the prism of a misshapen championship.

A strange summer dominated by the hissing sound of rain falling on grass and a few great memories. After the weekend we have had in Croke Park, all 160,000 of us, it seems odd to be prescriptive about the games. It is better though for the surgery to be pre-emptive than to take a knife to the game when next it is ailing.