Second, wear the number 27 jersey on Munster final day because you've been going so badly ("someone could wear 27 and be first sub, but Donie was (close number 27, " as his brother TJ puts it), watch the game pass by and in your disappointment ring up the team trainer at eight o'clock next morning to enquire about your place in the pecking order. Discover that your workrate in training has to increase and that you have to show the selectors you want to be there. Learn that they'll give you a fair crack of the whip if you do.

Lastly, put your head down, turn over a new leaf and train so diligently in the run-up to the All Ireland quarter-final that the fair crack of the whip from the now-impressed selectors arrives as early as the 27th minute, when they send you on for Niall Moran.

Amaze Cyril Farrell and Tomas Mulcahy by scoring the opening goal of the game.

Amaze yourself by adding two points. Start the semifinal and amaze the hurling world by bagging two goals, the first of them flicked in off a right side whose existence UN inspectors had been unable to verify, the second from a Brian Begley pass you draw on first time and send screaming to the Waterford net. Clinton Hennessy didn't see it, as lads told you afterwards? You didn't even see it yourself.

You are Donie Ryan. You score goals. You milk cows.

You don't drink, contrary to public perception. You're probably mad. You drive to training with Reale and Mike O'Brien and invariably arrive late. You can still "make a fair stones" of things from time to time, like that ball you pulled on against Clare, to connect with fresh air. In short, you're having the summer of your life.

You're no longer TJ's brother. That's the one sad part of it, actually, for TJ isn't there any more. For years he was, one of Limerick's foundation stones. Between 1994 and 2007 TJ Ryan missed only one championship game for the county, hurled in five of the six forward positions and at full-back and won a National League medal at centre-back. He was there for two All Ireland final defeats ("we definitely should have won one of them . . . probably 1996, because of the extra man"), the 2001 quarter-final mugging by Wexford ("I still don't know how we lost that one") and the 2003 qualifier defeat by Offaly in Thurles ("the bottom of the barrel"). Last year's All Ireland quarterfinal against Cork marked his farewell gig.

A comeback tour was never on the agenda. Up in Nenagh for the opening match of the league in February, Ryan looked at the two Kellys in the Tipperary fullforward line and decided he was as well off out of it. These last few weeks he's observed the job Brian Begley has done at full-forward and concluded he wouldn't have got his place there either. Come what may next Sunday, he's at peace with himself. "I made the decision and I was happy to walk away. You've got to live with the consequences. I wasn't destined to win an All Ireland. You just get on with it."

The elder Ryan has. He's played golf in Dromoland Castle and Doonbeg, he's gone racing a few times, he's milked the cows once or twice when Donie was training.

High on the aroma of his new freedom, he's occasionally looked back and wondered "was I feckin' mad?" for all those years. "There's another life out there outside of hurling. Okay, you might win an All Ireland medal. But that's only for the few."

Ask TJ the differences he's noticed about Limerick this year and he scarcely knows where to start. The big scores they've been putting up, the steel rod down the centre of the attack provided by Ollie Moran and Brian Begley, the effectiveness of the substitutes. "But the big thing was beating Tipperary and reaching the Munster final. That was the break Limerick hadn't been getting for years.

You wouldn't have said at the start of the year that they'd reach an All Ireland final. But back in 1994, we scored four goals to beat Cork in the Munster semi-final and things snowballed from there. It was the same this year after beating Tipp.

That's how it happens sometimes. You get a break at the start of a competition and off you go."

TJ and Donie. TJ a pillar of the county team, Donie three years younger and a pillar of nothing in particular. Much of it, according to TJ, was sourced in the fact that Eamonn Cregan "had no time" for Donie. "He might say that Donie was a mad bastard. He was a little bit crazy alright, probably still is.

Dave Keane didn't want him either. In fairness to Joe McKenna, he picked him and fine-tuned him." Indeed; the younger Ryan was a fixture on the team in 2005 and scored a . . . wrongly, he still contends - disallowed goal in the All Ireland quarter-final against Kilkenny. But before there was McKenna there was Tony Considine, and the day Tony Considine materialised in Knocklong to coach Garryspillane was the day Donie Ryan's career turned a half-circle.

To TJ it was a meeting of minds. Strange kinds of minds. "They say that mad people click, that they can talk to one another. That's what happened here. One mad lunatic talking to another. For some reason or other Tony was able to get through to him. One of Donie's biggest problems before Tony came along was that, though number 13 was his best position, he had no patience if the ball wasn't coming into him in the first 10 minutes of a match.

He'd go out the field looking for it. But Tony got a grip and made him stay in there."

Someone needed to. Donie was, the man himself freely admits, "a bit of a wild card".

Could do anything at any given moment on any given day. Score a point, start a row, get sent off. Sometimes he had considerable nuisance value; other times he was just a nuisance. "Tony Considine brought me along nice and gradually, got me concentrating 100 per cent on my game." Big Frankie Carroll was the Garryspillane full-forward; under Considine's tough-love regime it was hammered into Ryan to stay in the corner and wait for the breaks off Carroll instead of drifting out the field and getting himself into trouble. Garryspillane reached the county final in 2004, won it in 2005 and Donie Ryan was reborn.

That he'd repay Considine by helping short-circuit his tenure as Clare manager is an irony not lost on either brother. He was 33/1 to score the opening goal in the All Ireland quarter-final, the equivalent of a 100/1 shot leading home the field in the Grand National. Taking care not to look a gift horse in the mouth, their other brother, Davy, backed him at 8/1 to be first goalscorer against Waterford. Winner all right.

He is not the finished article and never will be. His extreme one-sidedness, for instance. That goal against Waterford was notable less for the fact that Ryan scored it, albeit newsworthy enough in itself, as for the fact that he scored it with his right hand.

Donie Ryan, goal, off his right:

he hasn't heard the end of it since.

It's his own fault, he sighs.

Their father Dan "used to break my heart" about the need to practise his right. He always reassured him that he would. Donie being Donie, he never did. At this stage, of course, it's much too late to teach an old terrier new tricks. "If I were 10 years youngerf And the thing is, the two boys [TJ and Davy] are fluent right and left. I'm not fluent at all. I don't know where I came out of." What he does know, on the other hand, is this. "I'm not the best hurler in Ireland, but I'd like to think that what I have I give." As for Cregan, who criticised him on radio following the faux pas against Tipp, "you'd think that a former manager like him would keep his mouth shut if he hasn't anything good to say."

The secret of Donie's recent reincarnation as Nicky Rackard? Doing what he's told, TJ surmises. "The goals he's got have come from the breaks off Brian Begley. A small corner-forward feeding off a big full-forward. In a nutshell, Donie is doing his job. Lots of former managers would have said that he didn't do what he was told. This time maybe he had to. You'd have to be proud of him. And delighted for him."

All Limerick required, Donie claims, "was a bit more guidance from the sideline and a few fellas getting themselves right and training properly". Himself included, clearly. A pity, he adds, that there aren't two Ryans on the panel. "It'll gall me to the day I die that the other fella is not involved. Sure he's been there for the last 100 years. I'm only half the player he was."

Half the player or not, his hour is now.