Here's the deal. We're in the Land Rover with Niall Moran, zooming up the drive to the family home amid a piece of verdant rural heaven hard by the Shannon rapids, at the edge of the Golden Vale, when there's a small bang. Moran sighs. The vehicle has hit a pothole.

Not a large pothole. Not a big-enoughto-bury-a-bullock-in pothole. But a pothole nonetheless, a pothole that Moran . . . son of Pat and Bridget, brother of Ollie and James, part-time farmer and latterly full-time hurler . . .

would have filled in at any other time, in any other summer.

Except, of course, this isn't any other time or any other summer. It's the summer of Limerick versus Tipperary, Parts I, II and III. It's an unending whirligig of games and training and ice baths and swimming pools and physios and recovery sessions. It's the life of a professional sportsman in everything but the wage packet. Niall Moran's normal daily round has not so much gone out the window as run away screaming. The grass is, he reflects, almost literally growing in around their feet on the farm "from my side of things". A good job that Pat Moran is there to take up the slack.

Much as Moran junior has been doing for his county of late. Two points in the first instalment against Tipp, three in the second and five in the third, the last of them from a Gerry Kennedy puckout he brought down and boomed over from the middle of the field for the trilogy's 125th and final score. If Ollie Moran was unquestionably the man of the series, his little brother was a live candidate for the best supporting actor statuette.

Thinking back on the hairpins and curlicues of the three matches, he ruminates on Brian Geary's point at the start of the second half of extra time at the Gaelic Grounds ("I think that was the score that just sucked the heart out of Tipp") before nominating the closing 10 minutes of the second game as the pivot of the affair. "There were so many twists and turns, but that night in Thurles we saved ourselves. Tipp were practically out of sight. For us to score seven points in as many minutes . . . well, it was probably freakish. Maybe that was the turning point. Everything was gone, then all of a sudden we were back in it."

He tells a story from the dressing room at half-time the same evening.

Limerick 10 points down, Gary Kirby taking them back to a similar situation in the 1996 Munster final. Plug away like we did then, Kirby told the players, point by point by point. "We had to go out and give it our all. We'd been in the same situation against Clare in Ennis last year and we'd folded. We had to move on." They did.

Come extra time two weeks ago, Moran was almost sick of the whole thing. Not quite, though. A third replay would have been difficult, but not that difficult. "You wanted to have a winner in the Gaelic Grounds. But if we'd had to play them 10 times I wouldn't have minded, as long as the result was a win." If there was a decisive factor, he believes, Limerick's greater hunger . . .

their greater necessity, at any rate . . . may have been it.

"We needed it more. Tipp have been the big stumbling block for us in recent years.

And Tipp are always Tipp, they produce hurlers every year. Limerick don't, not to the same extent."

Had they lost the third day:

Armageddon? "Absolutely."

Moran did more than most to ensure they didn't, his 12 shots at the Tipp uprights over the course of the series yielding only one wide and another attempt that dropped short.

No drowned puppy here. That said, he was far from happy with his form at Semple Stadium and had no complaints when he was called ashore midway through the second half.

"We weren't as sharp that night.

The effort we put in the first day had taken its toll. The 14 men and the heat and everything. And I was sluggish, whereas the previous Sunday I'd felt good in myself, even though it was hard to get on the ball with five forwards against six Tipperary backs.

Third time around, what I was most pleased about was how my workrate increased. After that, the ball ran for me."

About time it did in terms of the big picture of his intercounty career. A dual All Ireland under-21 medallist, his first championship start, against Waterford in 2003, saw him score 11 off Fergal Hartley and more than hold his own. His second, the replay, saw him take a bang after 10 minutes, depart with concussion and find himself in a hospital bed in Cashel alongside the Carlow goalkeeper, hors de combat from a similar knock against Kerry in the Semple Stadium curtain-raiser the same evening. Twenty-year-old Moran eventually got a lift back into Thurles and arrived in the square still wearing his gear to find the crowds gawking at him on their way from the match.

It could only get better. It didn't immediately. All those Limerick upheavals. All the near-annual wrongs of spring. All that embarrassing and painfully public laundrywashing. "So many things were unsettling for a young lad, the changes of management and everything else. I probably didn't develop the way I should have. Now I'd hope . . . hope . . . I'm more mature and can get on with my own game. To become more consistent, if nothing else."

Not a first-choice forward under Joe McKenna's management last year ("for one reason or another I wasn't as integral a part as I would have liked, but they were a very professional set-up, which was refreshing"), Moran had to wait for the arrival of Richie Bennis to refloat his career. He identifies Bennis's absolute faith in his players as the key.

"Richie and the lads came in at short notice last year and kind of had to make it up as they went along.

This year they've grown into the job.

If someone believes in you, you start to believe in yourself. Richie has brought that to my game, allowed me to express myself more freely.

The biggest thing he and the other selectors have brought, I think, is that you can just go out and perform.

You're not being told, 'Don't do this, don't do that.' He's very fair, a very good man to read a game and he's never stopped following club hurling. He knows every player inside out."

He could scarely have a more dedicated one in Moran. As a child he was reared on stories of Scanlan and Power and the Mackeys by his godfather the late Mick Hickey, Limerick's All Ireland-winning full-back in 1940 and a neighbour in Castleconnell. As a teenager he was a fixture at training sessions in the Gaelic Grounds, graduating to pucking the ball back from behind the goal with the team kitman and family friend Sean Murray and one storied evening even joining in to make up the numbers at Mike Houlihan's instigation. "Going to training and with James and Ollie playing for the county, you got a taste of it. The build-up to big matches, the atmosphere in the house. When it came to your turn, you knew how to perform.

You were bred to it."

Bred too to the land. One of these days, when his intercounty career is over, he will pursue more actively his love of farming. He couldn't think of a more fulfilling and enjoyable way of life. But not just yet, which is why he'll start as a business studies teacher in Ard Scoil Ris in Limerick in September. In the meantime, there's today.

"I'm very, very dedicated. My hurling is everything to me. But after five years of intercounty hurling, you have to have something achieved, something tangible to show for your efforts. A Munster medal would be something tangible. Finally your toil might be rewarded."

And one of these days, when life returns to normal, he might get that pothole sorted.

STRANGE DAYS ARE HERE BUT WATERFORD HAVE THE COURAGE MUNSTER

SHC FINAL LIMERICK vWATERFORD
Semple Stadium, 4.00 Referee S Roche (Tipperary) Live, RTE

Two Strange one. Had Tipperary managed to close it out against Limerick on any of the three days, this preview would be considerably more straightforward and its conclusion emphatic:

Waterford, almost certainly with something to spare. Then again, everything about the 2007 Munster championship has been strange.

A quarter-final that began with handbags at 12 paces and quickly assumed the dimensions of an international incident; a semi-final that went to two replays and two lots of extra time; another semi-final that featured eight goals in its 70 minutes;

trials and troubles and appeals and a J'accuse from Cork's Semplegate Three; Limerick reaching the final despite failing to win a single one of their three outings in normal time.

Against such a backdrop, the only possible surprise today will be if we don't in fact get thunder, lightning and 10 goals.

Why are Limerick better equipped to give Waterford plenty of it than Tipp would have been? Let us count the ways, none of which is to deprecate the latter's admirable grit and resolve.

It takes two to stretch a tie to 250 minutes, after all.

But Limerick had more coherence and conviction about them than Tipp did. Their morale was superior, their fitness likewise, their shuffling of substitutes ditto. They look rather better-equipped to cope with Waterford in the air. They're clearly not overreliant on one forward and don't have to work the sliotar into his patch, one of their most warming virtues over the course of the semifinal saga being their point-taking from out the field. And yes, the standard and tempo of Waterford/Cork was a level above anything provided by Limerick and Tipp, but we know that no two games are ever the same.

For that reason among others, expect Eoin Murphy to put his semifinal pallidness behind him. One also assumes that the Waterford full-back line have been instructed to bat rather than try to catch dropping balls, the source of two of Cork's goals. Eoin Kelly, meanwhile, might reflect that no sooner had he unnecessarily booted the ball away following his concession of a free than Cork had their third goal. Nemesis comes calling exceptionally quickly these days.

But if Waterford have Eoin Kelly, they also have Michael Walsh (right).

Despite his presence and the aptitude of Stephen Molumphy for processing neat, unfussy ball, Cork by virtue of their speed captured the midfield spoils on 17 June. Still, three minutes from time, with the winners hanging onto the most precarious of one-point leads, Walsh had the presence of mind and the energy to charge forward and create the John Mullane point that righted the ship again. That's courage. That's leadership. That's why Walsh is captain.

And partly why Waterford should win by two or three points.

VerdictWaterford LIMERICK B Murray; M O'Riordan, S Lucey, S Hickey; P Lawlor, B Geary, M Foley; D O'Grady, M O'Brien; N Moran, O Moran, M Fitzgerald; A O'Shaughnessy, B Begley, B Foley WATERFORD C Hennessy; A Kearney, D Prendergast, E Murphy; T Browne, K McGrath, K Moran; M Walsh, S Molumphy; D Shanahan, S Prendergast, E Kelly; J Mullane, P Flynn, J Kennedy