It was like a dream sequence, puffing around a field on a soggy winter Sunday, remembering all the connotations those maroon jerseys had held but feeling as if he had lost all bearings.

Those fresh faces on both teams, the eerie lack of needle - this was Galway, after all - the distressing level of fitness . . . it all made him feel as if he was drifting without anchor. Christ, what he would have given to see Brendan Lynskey thundering towards him, holding the devil's worth in his grin?

"I didn't enjoy it at all," shrugs Declan Carr in summing up his return to modern inter-county hurling after almost half a decade away. It was just a mild old hour of Oireachtas competition, but that's how the rebirth came about for him.

"I suppose even thinking of playing Galway this Sunday is strange because of course when I was with the Tipperary panel previously, games between the two counties were always really grudge events. But that has just disappeared, what with new players coming in on both sides and both counties trying to re-establish themselves." He knows he walked into this with his eyes wide shut. Nicky English just asked him to come back in that straightforward way of his and he figured he'd test the ice.

It was a no-win situation in many ways; every pub in Tipperary has framed stills of him hoisting the silverware in September 1991 and his face is of that era. There was the danger that seeing him padding around again in the twilight of the millennium might prove a jolt too unlikely for most fans to bear. But something about it appealed to Carr. So he said yes.

"I really don't know what the folks in Tipperary feel about my coming back and I'm afraid to ask. There were well-wishers, of course, but I'm sure others found it a bit strange. There were never any preconditions set, I felt my way back into it and I'm still totally unsure of how it's all going to pan back out."

Since October, he has spent interminable hours on the road to Thurles, burning mileage for the twice-weekly training pilgrimage.

He fancied the idea of fresh air and punishment for a while after too many years of soft living. Still, he couldn't imagine how much it would consume him, how totally the sport dominates now.

"That's the big change, the demands on time. Last October, when we got together, we thought that May would never come around. There was no end to it. Back in 1991, you'd have trained, but now the approach is total from diet right through. But it has to be done.

"Clare redefined the fitness levels in 1995 and maybe Tipperary were slower to adapt to that than most other counties. It's the way now."

In April of 1994 Carr left the country for Chicago. He was just winging it; four or five weeks in a good city, back home. Then Tipp fell in the first round of the championship and he spent a sweltering summer brick-laying and, like so many others, began to find himself addicted to the energy of American cities. The calendar lost the run of itself.

"Time just seemed to pass me by. It . . . I liked it over there and just stayed without any fixing a definite time period on it."

And without any sense of closure, it was as if his life as a hurler had just evaporated. Some summers he'd watch the live transmissions in the bars around Chicago and it seemed so distant that he wondered had he really participated in it all. And then the yearning would begin.

"God, yeah, it would kill you sometimes to be watching it. It was an exciting time, all the new counties coming through and you'd have given anything to be there. But you know, you just got up the next day and got on with things, lived without it."

He repatriated last year and the extent of his sporting life was a bit of club hurling around the suburbs of Dublin. His inter-county days belonged to photographs and beery nostalgia. Except English thought differently. So he turned up one overcast evening, a bit unsure, shaking hands with lads who were just slips when every soul in the county had known his face.

"I suppose I'm in an odd situation in that I can identify with the younger lads because I'm trying to break through as well. Before, okay, I was there, I was established. Now, you chat to the younger lads, have the craic and you know you're in the same boat as them. I'm a senior figure in that there's a few years in age between us, but I'm starting out again too."

He says that English never really elaborated on precisely why he wanted him back in the fold and Carr himself sought no explanation. Modesty precludes Carr from venturing an opinion on his own peripheral gifts, but it has long been accepted around the county that he has immense motivational presence and is one of those figures who manages to bond the disparate personalities that make up any inter-county panel.

Also, he knew what it was to win and would carry English's own sense of birthright when it came to Tipperary hurling. And, when fit, Carr could potentially give the team a midfield anchor which it had lacked since his own days. Carr pocketed a league medal in 1994 and has a precise measure on the value of gaining another against Galway tomorrow.

"Well, aren't we as well to win by two points and enjoy winning a national title for a few days? It can only be good for a young team to win something. But, I mean, our championship game against Clare follows shortly after that and naturally, that has been predominant in our minds."

Although Tipperary ended Clare's league in the semi-final, there was an unreality about the win.

"To be honest, we'd be more nervous of Clare now after that game. I don't think they played to even a quarter of their potential. As for the game, well, Clare had nothing to prove. We had. And I think Ollie Baker and Colin Lynch going off had a lot more to do with Ger Loughane's influence than anything we did on the field. So you just don't know about them, they're so hard to read."

When he is explaining why this has come to pass, why he busted a gut on dark nights when his contemporaries were cosying up with their memories, he just says that he "drifted into it, that one thing led to another."

In October, he didn't know if he'd be kicking around the following month. There were no promises, no meaningful soliloquies. He is just an old-timer who threw himself in with the youngsters, glad to feel the blood rush again.