Paul Fitzpatrick
A Saturday evening under the lights in Dublin 3, four grizzled veterans who have been decorated in battle, a little bit of a back story to add an extra zero or two to the gate. So this is big alley heaven for the neutrals...
The potential meeting of Dublin and Meath in an All-Ireland Senior Doubles final has been coming down the track for a couple of years now, ever since Carl Browne transferred from Kells to St Brigid's.
Now that it's coming to pass, we should savour every minute of it. That's it's happening in Croke Park, that there's a drop of bad blood in the mix and both sides are playing well, adds to it.
This one can roll back the years to the days of O'Connor and Walsh and Downey and Sheridan, the great survivor, raucous nights when legends were made. Tonight, handball fans, we're gonna party like it's 1999.
How will it go? It's very hard to know. With each passing year, surely Tom should be slowing down but there are few signs of it – his unique style of play seems to be able to hold back the waves of time, like an inverse King Canute.
Brian Carroll reached the last four of the Senior Singles this year and is in fine fettle. 'Boo' has played the best handball of his career in the last couple of years.
And Kennedy is Kennedy, a warrior, one of the ultimate competitors and, as he showed in the Senior Singles final a month ago, still very, very hard to beat in the grand old ball alley in the shade of the Cusack Stand.
It's not an exact science – it never is – but whatever way we tease out the equation, we still end up with the same solution – whichever side can miss least while making the big shots will win it.
And if that sounds simplistic, or obvious, that's because it is – but it's no less true for that.
Kills are the poison in the bite of any winning doubles team. It's a cliché of handball analysis that you must put the ball away in doubles but at the same time, boom and bust handball, Hail Mary shots at the bottom brick from the car park, will only get a pairing so far.
It's the team – and the player, in singles – who can be steady while nailing their kills when they present themselves that usually wins.
Meath are the masters at this. Sheridan's game is a study in economical play. That big left hand keeps the ball going round and round and round, clockwise, but when it sits up, Sheridan will take it on.
The same goes for Kennedy – he's one of the greatest a safety first, percentage players of all time; then again, he's one of the greatest of all time, regardless.
Unusually, so, in this final, it will be the men on the right – ordinarily the trusted, calm sidekicks who ride shotgun to the masterminds in these finals - who hold the wild cards in their hands.
Carroll and Browne are capable of sublime attacking play and and while they tailor their approach in doubles, they're still capable of shooting the lights out – or, on the flip side of the coin, missing more than is ideal.
Watching a roll-out merchant in action once, this correspondent made the point that maybe he shouldn't go for as many risky kills. A sage judge replied: “That's his handball.” Point taken.
So, it could well come down to the battle on the right - whoever takes that will be well on the way to winning the war.
Fans of the game know what to expect from all four men when they take to the court this evening and the concoction has the potential to be potent or even to boil over. Brilliant.
We make it 50-50. The place will be heaving. The handball will be the best played in the big alley anywhere in 2016. What more could you want?