They hail from under the shadow of the eponymous mountain in that wedge of county Carlow that straddles both Kilkenny and Wexford, Goresbridge being located on one flank and Kiltealy just down the road on the other. They draw their players from Borris, Ballymurphy and Rathanna: three villages, one parish. They are, in their own words, "a serious dual club"; next weekend the junior B footballers will be taking on Eire Og in the county final. They wear black and red, which has led to at least one Mount Leinster Rangers supporter who works elsewhere being asked why she has a Down flag on her car. The club secretary . . . of whom more anon . . . is a Waterford man, the chairman a Kildare man and the treasurer a Wicklow man. And today their senior hurlers, Carlow champions for the second year in a row and a team with an average age of 21, line out in the Leinster club quarter-final at Dr Cullen Park. Against some crowd called Shamrocks. From Ballyhale.

Much as you may feel tempted, don't bother remembering Mount Leinster Rangers in your prayers today. They don't want . . . whatever about don't need . . . them.

Why should they? The Rangers are where they desire to be. On the big stage, competing at the top level, facing the All Ireland champions, hoping for the best.

Though they didn't need to do their homework on their opponents, they did it anyway. A reconnaissance party that headed to Nowlan Park last Sunday for the Kilkenny county final, as they had for the semi-finals. "We knew what to expect without seeing them, " Murphy acknowledges.

"But you'd still like to see them without the two lads [Henry Shefflin and Cha Fitzpatrick] and see what they're capable of."

Hitting 1-20 with an understrength team was what Shamrocks were capable of on the day. If the Rangers delegation were shocked and awed, they're not saying.

Not that the underdogs are stepping into totally uncharted territory. Last year they made their debut in the provincial championship, faced Craobh Ciaran in Parnell Park a week after winning the Carlow title, conceded two soft goals and lost by 2-9 to 0-9. This time around they'll have "a slightly better idea" of what to expect, Murphy believes. As one of their players travels to training from Limerick, another from Dublin and two or three from Waterford, commitment is not an issue. "Oh, the commitment's there alright. And the lads believe. They believe they can do it against Ballyhale. Fifteen against 15."

John Coleman, a Rangers selector, views the matter from a different angle. "What Shamrocks do is beyond our control. After that we'll see what happens, where it'll take us. We came a hard road out of our own county. Now we're playing the best team in the country. This is where we measure ourselves. We couldn't ask for any more."

A few years ago they wouldn't have dreamed of asking for more. They wouldn't have dared. Having tasted defeat in the county finals of 2001, '03 and '05, Mount Leinster Rangers knew what it was like to lose before they knew what it was like to win.

So too, indeed, did earlier generations of hurlers in the parish, for prior to the formation of the club in 1988, Ballymurphy had lost four county finals and Borris one. That made it eight senior finals lost in the parish.

What made the difference last year? Choose between Murphy's "our heads were right" and Coleman's "we decided we weren't going to lose another feckin' final".

There was more to it than that, naturally. Mick Purcell arrived from Good Counsel College last year as manager and taught them a thing or two about heart and commitment. As part of the package, Thomas Mullally arrived from Glenmore as coach and taught them a thing or two about technique. Mullally has stayed on, with Eire Og clubman Don Walker, previously the Rangers' football manager, succeeding Purcell as manager. What with Walker's emphasis on fitness and Mullally's emphasis on finesse, all the right boxes have been ticked.

The big lesson Mullally has learned from his sojourn in Carlow is the extent to which skilful hurling can exist, and flourish, off-Broadway. "The work has been put in by the club, and not just this year or last year either. Every night of the week the pitch is being used for hurling or football, and there's a little patch at the back of the goal that the under-eights and under-10s play on. Individually a lot of the lads are very skilful and would compare favourably with players of their age in Kilkenny. The difference is that in a county like Kilkenny, standards are higher because of the greater numbers. You'd have more good players on a team and more competitive teams in the county."

Mullally, then, wasn't required to turn straw into gold. Mount Leinster Rangers had the raw material, including no fewer than five members of the Carlow team that reached the 2006 provincial minor decider.

To Mick Murphy, who trains the Rangers minor side that will contest the county semi-final in a fortnight's time, the club's emergence at senior level has been no surprise. "People from other counties might not be aware of this, but the underage structures here in Carlow are very good.

The young players in the clubs here are as good as they are in any county in Ireland."

Evolution has followed revolution. Whereas a loud sigh of relief accompanied last season's breakthrough, pleasure and satisfaction were the handmaidens of this year's county final triumph against St Mullins. "I honestly think that retaining the title was a bigger achievement than getting our hands on it in the first place, " John Coleman says. "Everyone was out to beat us. St Mullins really put it up to us. We had to dig very deep."

The crowd that greeted them on the street in Borris that night was even bigger than the one that had turned out to celebrate 12 months earlier. A teacher at the local vocational school, the club treasurer Hugh Byrne knocked "a fair bit of gallery" out of the kids from Myshall and Ballinkillen in his classes the following week. "I'd say the other clubs in Carlow thought we were a flash in the pan. 'We'll give ye the one title, ' that sort of thing. We showed them there was more to us than that."

The county final turned on a bizarre incident that has been much discussed in the interim, outside the county as well as inside. Mount Leinster Rangers were leading by a point with five minutes remaining when Sean Michael Murphy, their left-corner forward, scored a once-in-a-lifetime goal. We'll let him take up the story.

"John Coady had the ball in his hand in defence and cleared it. My man had gone forward, there was space in behind him. I had no intention of handpassing the ball, it just bounced. The goalie was coming out.

I chanced my arm . . . no, actually, I didn't chance my arm. It just happened. I doubled on the ball with my hand and it went into the net. I didn't know whether it was legal or not. I looked at the umpires. I looked at Pat Moran, the referee. None of them moved.

Then the green flag was waving."

Try and get your hands on a copy of a DVD of the county final, adds Coleman.

"It's a goal worth looking at. A special goal.

A different goal to anything I've ever seen.

Like Nicky English against Cork or DJ against Antrim. An original goal."

In the exceedingly unlikely event that Murphy repeats the feat today, one man who won't be there to witness it is the club secretary Joe Power, who flew out to South Africa on Friday to participate in the Niall Mellon Township Trust. This is the fourth successive year that Power, who fits water pumps and filtration systems for a living, has gone to Cape Town. There he'll be meeting up with numerous old faces from the previous trips, among them Larry Cody, a long-standing friend who not only hails from Ballyhale but also happens to be a brother-in-law of Henry Shefflin's. Power has arranged to ring John Coleman's brother Eamon for the match report.

We can probably hazard a guess as to what subject the pair of them will be discussing tonight, 5,000 miles from Mount Leinster.