Venerable Paul Conroy spans the epochs of Galway football

It was way back in the summer of 2008 when a 19-year old Paul Conroy came off the bench to score the effective winning point in his first Connacht final against Mayo.

There was still a Bush in the White House, the Celtic Tiger was supposedly due for a soft landing, and the late Sean Fitzpatrick was a revered master of the banking universe.

He's soldiered through a few epochs of Galway football since then - one of them none too glorious - and recovered from a double leg fracture at the turn of his 30s, even spending a few weeks in a wheelchair.

In 2024, he's been hoarding Man of the Match awards like an Irish back-row forward. "I'm a long time waxing lyrical about Paul Conroy," said Padraic Joyce said after the Monaghan game. "I played with him, he's around that long..."

Conroy collected his sixth Connacht medal this summer, a fairly typical haul for a Galway footballer of his longevity.

However, the tally becomes more impressive when you consider that the first half of his inter-county career was played out with Galway football mired in the doldrums and barely operating in the same postcode as their rivals to the north.

This at least partly goes to explain why Conroy has become one of the most celebrated current footballers with no All-Star to his name.

The 2008 campaign was initially greeted as a renaissance for Galway with Padraic Joyce revelling in his late-stage role as a centre-forward playmaker and Michael Meehan enjoying his finest campaign in maroon, giving his signature performance in the downpour against Kerry in the quarter-final.

A teenage Conroy came on stream with a six-point tally against Roscommon on his championship debut. The previous year, he'd captained Galway's minors to their first All-Ireland in 21 years