Can football's Easter resurrection deliver a glorious summer?

After last weekend's Croke Park thriller to decide the Division 1 football title, there were many who went on social media afterwards to posit a view that the fare on offer only served to justify the continuation of league finals.

One post from a journalist on X, read: "Get rid of league finals." - Died 6.20pm. March 31, 2024.

Such talk on dispensing with the divisonal deciders has only gained traction in recent years - since the GAA's introduction of the split season and with it an April start to the championship. Prior to that we had league semi-finals in football and there wasn't much crowing for such games to be scratched from the fixture list.

Instant, sometimes well-thought-out, sometimes not, reactions to last Sunday's Dublin-Derry epic, were plentiful. It's perhaps a tad self-righteous to say that the encounter has put an end to any talk that such finals will be no more. More revealing were those who applauded the performances from both counties, with the more eye-catching words stitched together in the sentences that summed up Derry's contribution.

We got more than a glimpse of what Gaelic football could be: end-to-end fare where players are not afraid to take aim at the posts. In fact Dublin had 10 different scorers from play; a list that did not include Brian Fenton, Ciarán Kilkenny and Con O'Callaghan. For Derry, their live-wire centre-back Eoin McEvoy popped up with two goals in a player-of the-match display.

It's whetted the appetite to what the championship could offer.

Before last Sunday's thriller, Eamonn Sweeney, writing in The Sunday Independent, uttered a pesimistic note on what's to come with the words: "The football championship will lumber into action like someone struggling into work on Monday morning