Of course, hours of free booze had the effect you’d imagine. I remember falling asleep outside a service station in Blackpool, festooned with half-eaten chocolate digestives, after one such visit.

Seeing the minute-by-minute account of the celebrations in Gaoth Dobhair brought me back to those days. Last week social media meant seeing the new Ulster club champions literally plan their days in front of you in real time.

It got to the stage where we ended up asking Limerick hurling manager John Kiely about it at a gig during the week.

“I think we’d be only in the ha’penny place compared to those boys,” said Kiely up in Limerick, laughing when we brought up the image of the Donegal lads singing ‘Sweet Caroline’.

“Fair play to them, those are the memories that those lads will have in years to come of days like that and they’re more than entitled to do it and I think it’s great to see them enjoying it.”

Kiely summed it up neatly. You work hard to achieve something on the field of play and you celebrate it and people don’t begrudge you that enjoyment. Why is there a queasy sensation about it, then?

We asked Kiely about Limerick’s All-Ireland celebrations at the same gig. Maybe his answer helps to tease that out: “To be honest you could count the number of nights that we were out on one hand, times have changed. The nature of celebrating All-Irelands has changed, fellas are busy with their clubs as well for months and the club scene is taken so much more seriously now.

Club managers expect very high standards from their players as well and a lot of lads are back at work, back in college, doing final year projects, doing teaching practice.

“They’ve a lot of demanding stuff going on for themselves that they’re trying to get on with so I suppose it’s not the same as what it used to be but we’ve still had a couple of great nights out.” The intersection of real life and what it expects - correction: demands - with the strange alternative world, where celebrating with a session means writing off a couple of days, is what you might call a contested space.

A lot depends on where you’re standing in the argument: if you’re a 20-something tearaway you probably think little of the Gaoth Dobhair lads’s week.

If you’re a decade or two further along the track you probably see only the skull-wasting hangover a day or two down the road if you tried something similar. Kiely’s views captured the spectrum: in essence, you have to adapt your carousing to the wider world rather than the other way around.

An All-Ireland-winning captain told this writer that after he came down the Hogan Steps with the silverware he didn’t have a day without drink from that September Sunday to the following March. That no longer applies, no matter what mock-heroic descriptions you get second-hand.

Where to fit last week’s news that the Six Nations will have Guinness as its title sponsors over the next six years? In the same schizophrenic zone occupied by all our thinking on drink, probably.

Jay’s life less ordinary

Ricky Jay died last week aged 72. You might remember him from movies such as Homicide, The Spanish Prisoner and Boogie Nights (he was the cameraman in the last one).

Jay was a lot more than a character actor, however. He was one of the greatest sleight-of-hand card tricksters of all time - he performed his act on the road with musicians such as Herbie Hancock, in nightclubs with the likes of Timothy Leary, and he offered his deep understanding of card sharks and con-men to moviemakers courtesy of his company, Deceptive Practices (Arcane Knowledge on a Need-To-Know Basis).

His book Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women leans on his time in the sixties as a carnival barker, but his explanations of how exactly people get conned are what I go back to. Between his essays and interviews on the con (and The Big Con by David Maurer, an all-time classic), I fancy I could never be a ‘mark’.

But then again, all marks think that.

Proof of sport’s selling power

I’ve recommended it before but will repeat here that a site well worth checking out is RTÉ’s Brainstorm (rte.ie/eile/brainstorm). Its content is delivered by academics around the country and while it doesn’t cover sport specifically that often, when it does it can hit the mark.

For instance, I came across a piece by Colm Kearns from DCU recently on the site about sponsorship and sport. This can be a nebulous area, with a good deal of ducking and diving about the quantifiable benefits for companies of getting involved in underwriting sports and teams.

Kearns, in fairness, drilled down to the nuts and bolts: “My own research explores the cultural power and commercial value of sport by examining a brief but interesting period in which mobile services provider, Three, were the primary sponsors of both the Republic of Ireland international football team and the Ireland international rugby union team,” he wrote.

“Their 2013 sponsorship campaign, celebrating the fans of the football team as ‘the best in the world’, saw SIM sales rise by 214 per cent that year.

“In 2015, the year they produced their first campaign for the rugby team, they triumphed at the Irish Sponsorship Awards.”

Your view of the level of achievement involved in winning the Irish Sponsorship Awards is a matter for yourself, but a 214% rise in sales?

Proof, if you needed it, that sport sells.

Museum area should be new year’s resolution for Cork

This is the time of year when sports books and histories start to pop into people’s heads, which sparks a memory for your columnist.

Wasn’t there some reference to the possibility of a museum in Páirc Uí Chaoimh when the stadium was being redeveloped?

If so, it might be a good time to put some thought into it.

There’s hardly a county in the GAA with a history like Cork’s, despite some ardent propagandists for other zones.

Could a museum-type area be run in conjunction with a coffee shop in the stadium? You’d like to think so.

What’s that? Punters would have to exit through the gift shop? What’s wrong with that as an idea anyway?