LockerRoom: Ronnie Feeney rings. He has some bad news. It's official. We are old. It's 25 years since we left school.

There will be a gathering in February. We will round ourselves up in a badly-lit room and look each other over. Each one of us will note that everyone else has got very decrepit looking.

Of course it being quarter of a century since we left school means that it is 30 years since we arrived there. I went to Joey's in Fairview for the football and hurling but discovered quickly that everyone else in the year was better at those things than I was. So I stayed for the crack.

There was lots of that. The school had been through its Devil's Island period and was enjoying an era (long since receded) when young men brimming with testosterone could run a little bit wild. The brothers were a dwindling tribe and those who tended us, Smokie, Flash, Bump et al did so with a resigned weariness which suggested that they saw the intake of 1975 as the low tidemark of western civilisation.

Sport was pretty much everything until such time as girls and drink became pretty much equal concerns. Don't say we weren't ecumenical.

We GAA boys played soccer with a tennis ball on the tar-topped basketball court in Fairview Park during lunchtime. My delicate tackling style briefly earned me the nickname Hack and long after the nickname had worn off I took it to have been prophetic career advice. My best friend, surnamed Hayes, got the immensely preferable nickname of Purple and there was Tiddles and Twisty and Sharky and Skinnier Reid and so on, like a pantomime cast.

If it rained heavily, which it did for most of the seventies, we went to Terry Rodgers' snooker hall and played on the worn baize for the five minutes or so that we could afford. You had to pass a little shop in the way, I've forgotten the name, but it was between Gaffneys and the snooker hall and in there you could buy the vital accessories of a loose Major and a match. For health reasons you were actually better off shaping into the snooker hall with a fag hanging from your mouth than you were with the penny in your pocket.

One afternoon a week was designated as games day and we would play interminable leagues which nobody ever kept track of and for which no medals were ever awarded. My most distinct memory is of one of our number deciding to give the late, great Brendan Leahy a headache by big-toeing the ball from a penalty kick high over the bar and into the adjacent Tolka. It went like this.

"Lads, lads watch this." Big run up. Big toe. Big splash.

Then an iced Kerry voice.

"Go in and get it."

"Okay, Sir."

And down our hero went into the sludge and slime to retrieve the O'Neill's ball.

Some people got on to the school team as a matter of course. They were genetically programmed to be on school teams. They weren't asked to go out for trials. They were asked, respectfully, if they might like to play. They had famous brothers or fathers and if they were half the men that the famous brothers or fathers were, well . . .

The rest of us had to go for trials up in Scoil Mhuire, developing our sidestep and swerve as we tried to keep our Gola boots out of the cowshite. With a couple of exceptions the intake of 1975 were in no way as good as the intake of virtually any prior year. The years ahead of us produced All-Ireland medal winners aplenty.

Kevin Heffernan, Des and Lar Foley, Simon Behan, Blackie Cohen, Norman Allen, Tony Hanahoe, Gay O'Driscoll, Pat Canavan, Vincent Conroy and more. The years after us produced Eamon Heary and Tommy Conroy. None of our intake went on to win an All-Ireland senior medal, though. In 1975 I assumed that anyone keeping me off the school team was destined to be a multiple All-Ireland medallist.

The school had been the first Dublin school to win the Leinster Colleges' hurling title and the first day school to win the Hogan Cup. Back in 1975, in the decade of the Dubs, I think we marked the beginning of the end of the school's GAA prowess.

Brendan Leahy coaxed a couple of soccer All-Irelands out of the pupils in the nineties but the GAA died. Curtis Fleming, Brian Mooney and Kevin Doherty came out of the school but the oul gah expired.

A few years ago a pupil from Joey's came into this newspaper to complete some sort of project (wouldn't have happened in my day) and announced to this hack, still psychologically scarred from successive failures on school teams, that it was a real "pain in the arse" being made to play for Joey's.

At the weekends we played, with the exception of Senator Brady of Parnell's, for St Vincent's and on Sundays if Croke Park was open we were down there selling programmes or running in and out the little gate in the fence which separated the Hill from the Cusack.

Obviously it was a tribal obligation to stand on the Hill but on days of drizzle it felt grown up to sit under the sharp-angled roof upstairs in the Cusack and there was great joy in going down and standing behind the visiting team's bench and, with a secure fence as protection, indulging in a little culchie-baiting. Rednecks, we'd say wittily. Gwannowfuckawayoffwithya, they'd retort. It was dazzling stuff, it really was.

We know our way around Croke Park. After the 1977 hurling final a couple of us blagged our way into the Cork dressing-room masquerading as cousins of Tom Cashman. I remember our awestruck glances at the players jumping into the old style sunken baths. To give more than one awestruck glance of course meant that you were homosexual so we soon got on to trying to separate Jimmy Barry Murphy from his hurley. I've questioned JBM since on the matter and he has no clear memory of the matter but admitted to a feeling of unease whenever he saw a hack approaching him in a dressing-room after a match.

Before we knew it, of course, the whole thing was over. As was the way then the class shrunk after the Inter Cert. The rest of the academics stayed on for the Leaving and between us earned enough points for an Arts course. Our results were so bad as to skew the entire national average for the 1980s giving the country a reputation for stupidity, spawning the phenomenon of Paddy Irishman jokes and causing the great wave of depression and emigration which would soon engulf the country. That was all our fault. Sorry.

They gave us our certs on the night of the Stardust disaster. I can remember a gang of us standing outside Gaffneys debating whether to go to the Stardust or to go to the Sheds in Clontarf in search of more drink. Next morning our year had lost its first son and we wouldn't be seeing each other much anymore. We were left on our own to be grownups.

That was then. On Sunday mornings now we stand on a pitch in Scoil Mhuire or just over the wall in Vincent's and try to tell the 13-year-old faces before us that this is it, that this is the time of their lives, the most uncomplicated, sweetest, purest, best time. The faces gaze back blankly at the lame old men talking to them. Just like we used gaze back too. It takes 30 years to sink in, see.

(Paid Notice: The Joey's annual reunion dinner takes place on February 4th in Clontarf Castle at 8pm. Tickets from school, phone: 8339779.

Those who left 25 years ago are asked in advance to make special arrangements with their probation officers.)