Gearóid Hegarty enjoying special days alongside his best friends

​By Paul Keane

These are special days of celebration for Gearóid Hegarty and his All-Ireland SHC winning Limerick colleagues but there is a sadness there too. A sadness that the group breaks up now.

Chances are one or two of them won't be back at all. For the rest of them, they won't reconvene collectively until mid-winter.

That thought struck Hegarty even before last Sunday's final win over Galway, when they were deep in preparation mode.

"We do this little thing before each game, when they're showing us a few clips, and the game would be titled, so it was game 14 out of 14, all the way from the League, League final, Munster championship, Munster final, All-Ireland semi-final, the final, 14 games," said Hegarty.

"And I just couldn't believe it was showing game 14 out of 14. In a way, if you tried to convince me, you'd nearly make me believe that the Munster championship hasn't even started yet. Because I feel like the year has just flown.

"So, to think that we won't have training this week is amazing."

It was a year Hegarty would have been happy to let run and run.

"Sometimes you get to the end of a year and you are really looking forward to it, to the year being over," he said. "I've had maybe one year in the past, I'm not sure what year it was, where you can't wait for it to be over. This year, whatever it was, and it's a brilliant feeling, I just can't believe the year's over already."

Life goes on, of course, and at pace. Hegarty and his fiancée, Niamh McCarthy, will shortly tie the knot in Spain. Limerick colleagues David Reidy and Seán Finn will act as groomsmen. Later on in the year, Reidy himself, along with Will O'Donoghue and Tom Morrissey will have their own weddings.

For Hegarty, it feels like a series of family weddings that are coming up.

And if you were in any doubt about just how close they all are, consider the last score Limerick got in last Sunday's All-Ireland decider.

Hegarty rose up to grab a Nickie Quaid puck-out from the air and, in plenty of space, looked certain to sling over what would have been his very first point of the entire day. Instead, seeing Reidy on his right, in only a marginally more favourable position, he laid the sliotar off to his close friend, who'd just come on as a substitute, to open his own scoring account.

"They're my best friends, all the boys," said Hegarty. "It can be easy to say that, but when it boils down to it in the toughest, toughest moments, that friendship and bond comes out. When the heat comes on, like maybe it did against Galway in the first half, or like it did especially in the semi-final with 15, 20 minutes to go, when the dung hits the fan, that's when you see what you're made of and how close and how tight you are, and how much of a unit you are. It's a special feeling to go out onto the field with these lads and battle and battle and battle and be successful, and to come away with the cup."

Getting married on the back of an All-Ireland win is something Hegarty doesn't take for granted either. In fact, he was desperate for it to pan out this way.

"I was trying to manifest it all year," he said. "It wasn't necessarily in my head during the game. But in the lead up to the game, and a few days before it, it was in my head a lot, thinking about how extra special this would be to be getting married this year and to have...look, Liam MacCarthy won't be there, we're going to Portugal for the wedding, the cup's not going to come over, but it will be there in spirit. And that's what I wanted so badly."

Hegarty, whose father, Ger, hurled for Limerick in the 1990s, comes from a hurling-mad family. He said they will get a real kick out of celebrating his wedding in the company of the Limerick panel, the reigning All-Ireland title holders.

As a strong contender to land the Hurler of the Year award for the second time in his career, Hegarty's family may very well have another opportunity to surround him and celebrate him later this year.

"All you want, when it boils down to it, is to get on that bus (after the All-Ireland final) and to have the Liam MacCarthy at the front of that bus," said Hegarty, shrugging.

"Anything else is a bonus once you have that cup on the front of the bus."

Being part of an All-Ireland winning group for the sixth time places Hegarty in an elite crew of performers. He is level now with, for example, Kilkenny's Eddie Keher and Derek Lyng, and Tipperary legend Jimmy Doyle. How does that sound?

"I think it sounds unreal," grinned Hegarty. "I love looking back at all the games. I do love the history around the game. Something that I noticed on Sunday, I had a quick flick through the match programme and I think Limerick had 12 All-Irelands before the game, and now we have 13, and our group has six of those, which is almost half of Limerick's tally. So if we were to get one more, that would be 50 percent of all the All-Irelands that Limerick have won.

"I'm just happy for the people of Limerick. Obviously it's a cliché but we just get incredible support and I'm looking forward to seeing the people of Limerick and celebrating with them, and celebrating over the next few days and weeks."