'It was a bleak winter' - John Kiely's forgotten false start

"We'd played two games and been bate in both games. It was a case of... what's another year? Simple as that."

Now in his seventh campaign as Limerick senior manager, John Kiely is seeking a fifth All-Ireland title. He already has five Munster titles in a row, a feat only achieved before by Cork.

Across league and championship, he's managed Limerick in 12 finals and won all of them. Comparisons with Brian Cody's Kilkenny team of the late 2000s are inevitable and they are building a compelling body of evidence that they are the greatest team in history.

And how did his first season in charge go? With a Round 1 qualifier exit to an otherwise out-of-sorts Kilkenny in Nowlan Park, having earlier finished third in Division 1B of the National Hurling League.

It's one of the curiosities of the last half-decade in hurling that one of the most success laden managerial runs in the game began on such a forgettable note.

The first season feels like it barely belongs in the Kiely managerial story.

That it belongs in the story of a different manager altogether, one who vacated the post after two years having achieved little, with a perfunctory statement from the county board that autumn wishing him all the best in the future. Before talk swiftly moved onto his successor.

As if you were watching 'Sunderland 'Til I Die' and it suddenly turned into 'The Last Dance'.

While the Limerick dynasty did not spring up out of nowhere - they had won Under-21 titles in 2015 and 2017 and their minors had been massive favourites for the 2014 final - the abruptness of its onset was pretty startling.

At the conclusion of Kiely's first season, they sat at or near the foot of the pecking order among hurling's elite. Dublin had experienced something of a player