“Go back to the mid-sixties and Limerick CBS were really the doyens of colleges hurling. They were just outstanding.

“By 1968 they were going for five Harty titles in a row, and as usual they had a lot of good players, like Pat Hartigan. They were down to play Coláiste Chríost Rí met them in the Harty that year and we thought that Limerick would be too strong for them.

“In fairness, looking at the Chríost Rí team now it was very strong. Mick Bohane and Seamus Looney from the Barrs, Dan Callanan. Brendan Cummins from Blackrock was the captain and was a terrific centre-back at the time. They rattled into Limerick CBS and beat them, and that was the kind of result that gave all the other teams in the competition hope for the following season.”

In 1969 Farranferris were up against Limerick CBS in the first round, and the Cork side had a bit of pedigree themselves by then.

“In our second year in Farna we’d won the Dr White Cup, which was then the U15 ½ competition; we were hammered in the Dean Ryan final the following year by St Flannan’s, but it meant we had good experience.

We also had players who’d been on the Farranferris Harty Cup team which played Limerick CBS in the 1967 final. That was a huge plus, obviously, to have lads like Frank O’Brien, Anthony Whooley, Kevin Murray, Dommy Holly and Teddy O’Donovan still there.

“A couple of lads like myself were too old for minor. I was 18 in September coming back to school, so we had a good few lads at the age.

“That makes a huge difference because you could have a young lad of sixteen up against a nineteen-year-old.”

Farranferris defeated Limerick, then Thurles CBS, and ended up facing St Colman’s in the semi-final.

“We’d played them in the Mardyke previously in the O’Callaghan Cup, a really wet day, and Canon O’Brien, who was training us, threw in a new sliotar that day which was like a rock. It was like playing with a bowl.

“We scored about ten goals and beat them by a cricket score in the ‘Dyke so we thought we’d have no bother taking care of them in the Harty.“

Real life intervened, however. A teachers’ strike meant the boarders in Farranferris were at home, not honing their skills under the Canon’s watchful eye.

“We had no hurling done. Now in fairness, Colman’s were probably in the same boat, but it certainly affected us, the fact we didn’t have much training done. The Colman’s trainer was Fr O’Donnell, and there was a lot of argy-bargy about the venue for the game.”

Collins recalls that there had been “some sort of gentleman’s agreement” between Farranferris and Colman’s to share venues for games, each school getting every second one.

By that agreement Colman’s would host the semi-final.

“The Canon put up a vigorous argument that with a Harty semi-final that agreement wasn’t valid, we had to have a neutral venue somewhere.

“Fr O’Donnell insisted on the agreement and it went back and forth until the Canon said we’d play them in Fermoy. He might have been thinking we’d go down and beat the lard out of them, but we were very lucky to come out of it.”

Colman’s had quality themselves. Sean O’Farrell and Packie Lawton were among their big names, along with a powerful youngster from Youghal.

“Seanie O’Leary was a good bit younger than the others but he was very well regarded even then. He could play centre-back or corner-forward and do plenty of damage in both places: he was powerful, legs like tree trunks, and daring.”

In the end O’Leary almost proved the trump card, with Colman’s switching him to attack late on, but Farranferris had enough done.

That win got them a date with the winners of the other semi-final, another all-Cork lineup, with Chríost Rí taking on Sullivan’s Quay in the other semi.

The latter were also very strong at that time. Collins recalls some of their leading lights: “They had Sean Collins from Blackrock, Donie Collins, a namesake of mine, Andy Creagh played with them later.

“Fr Pat Barry was a key man for them. I always found him very hard to play against, he was all arms and legs and very hard to get away from.

“He had a kind of straight-arm swing, a hard player - you weren’t picking up many man-of-the-match awards when marking him.”

Chríost Rí came through to make it the first all-Cork final but very heavy rain the week of the game meant a postponement. The pitch was flooded.

“The sod in the old Athletic Grounds was a kind of black sod,” says Collins.

“It was very good for hurling when the weather was good, incidentally, and it was better the following week when the game was eventually played.”

When the Harty final was finally played it formed part of a double-header, with St Brendan’s playing Coláiste Iosagan in the Corn Uí Mhuiri final, boosting the crowd, at least temporarily.

“After the football game finished none of those supporters stayed around,” says Collins.

“We probably thought there were 20,000 spectators left in the stadium as it was, but it was a lot less with the football supporters gone home.”

Farranferris togged off at what we now call the City End, with their opponents next door. “Before we went out onto the field they started chanting in their dressing room,” says Collins.

“‘We are the champions’, that kind of thing. They had a lot of good players: Seamus Coughlan, Noel Miller, Dan Callanan, Eamonn Fitzpatrick, Martin O’Doherty, Brian Murphy.

“One advantage we had over a few of them, though, was that we were a bit older than them. “We had a few younger players as well but that experience stood to us.

“The game itself was fairly ding-dong, 1-4 each at half-time.” The students from the seminary had some quality advice waiting for them in the dressing-room at the break, however.

Christy Ring had been with us all along, and at half-time he went down on one knee in the dressing room and said, ‘Lads, ye have them.

‘Ye’re playing into the Blackrock goal in the second half and I always thought that was the scoring goal, it sucks the ball into the net. Ye’ll get goals’.

“The blue eyes popping out of his head, his words had a huge impact on us.”

Ring’s prediction proved accurate. Farranferris hit five goals in the second half.

Frank O’Brien was one of the big stars at colleges level at that point, adds Collins.

“He was larger than life, daring, skilful, though in the classroom he enjoyed distracting us a fair bit of the time.

“Before some game or other we were playing he got a belt across the leg in training, and in the class afterwards he brought it up with the Canon, who was then a Father.

‘You know the crack I got across the leg last week, Father?’

‘Yes, Frank, what about it?’

‘Well, Peter Falvey had a sniff of it there before class and he thinks it’s poisoned, there’s a desperate smell off it.’

“The Canon exploded: ‘I’ve enough of this’ and stormed out, resigned, the whole lot. We had to go back to him a couple of days later and talk him into reconsidering.

“Which didn’t take much, admittedly.”

The other O’Brien was another integral part of the scene.

Collins says the Canon wasn’t just good as a coach on the training field: “He was always innovative with his drills and so on, but he was also a master of psychology. A typical move would be to come into the dressing room before training and to throw the bag on the ground, pretending to be in a temper, and say, ‘I’ve never been so insulted in all my life, I’ve been stopped by the lollipop woman down by the Mon and she told me - ye won’t do, ye’ve no heart.’

“At the time we might have thought, ‘that’s an awful thing to say to him, when in reality of course the lollipop woman no more gave out to him about the Farranferris Harty team .

When my brother went to Farna he remembered being up in the study hall one evening and the Canon stormed in with a letter he said had been sent by a past pupil of Sullivan’s Quay calling Farna a bunch of caubogues from west of the Viaduct who didn’t know one end of a hurley from the other.

The study hall is an interesting reference. Boarding has died out in many areas now but a school like Farranferris was a hurling hothouse before a big Harty game.

“You lived for the matches, because life as a boarder could be mundane enough otherwise. That was one of the downsides, that all you had to talk about was the games, really.

“The only outlet was maybe going to the pictures during the week or if there was a match in the Athletic Grounds at the weekend you might get down to it.

“The smaller kids would look up to you when you were on the team, the way I did myself. When I went up there first I’d be looking at the photograph of the 1963 team which won the first Harty and All-Ireland for Farna, they were gods to us.

“But it could create its own tension as well, anywhere you went in the school someone was asking ‘how will ye do’ all the time.”

The red-brick building overlooking Cork’s northside had an influence far beyond the city, functioning as a finishing school for players from the west of the county in particular.

“It wasn’t even something restricted to Cork or the intercounty scene.

“With Farna you had lads who never played for Cork but who went back to their clubs as much better hurlers, they got involved with the club and helped to raise standards.

“It’s not all about Cork. Places like Kilbrittain, Newcestown, Timoleague, Farranferris is a huge loss to those places in terms of hurling. And the same for Sullivan’s Quay in its area, too.”

The quality wasn’t confined to the four Cork teams which contested the 1969 Harty Cup semi-finals.

A fifth came along the following year, the North Monastery, which won the Harty and the All-Ireland in 1970. The colleges competition then became a living experiment in the rules of hurling, with teams restricted to 13 players a side.

“That was tailor-made for the Canon in terms of tactics - and his hurling acumen, which was always very sharp. In our last year we had no goalkeeper but the Canon decided the main requirement for a keeper was coolness, like Mick Cashman from Blackrock. He felt Gerry Hennessy from Ballineen was cool enough, so he became the keeper.

“In terms of the thirteen-a-side game Limerick CBS that time had a guy, Francis Brosnahan, who played for Young Munster later but who was a crack colleges hurler.

The Canon met some of the Christian Brothers from Limerick at one game and they said, ‘nil faic agaibh’ for the final.

“With 13-a-side there was no full back, and Brosnahan was the centre-back, so the Canon took one of the players, JJ Murphy, who was a huge young fella, and put him on Brosnahan - but Murphy played as a full-forward, and Brosnahan followed him. Murphy got two goals and Brosnahan was looking at the sideline for direction.

“It was an attractive spectacle - and it was also a challenge to coaches, because they had to come up with something to exploit the space, and the Canon did.”

The Canon expected, too.

“As a past pupil you’d drop into the dressing room before the game to encourage the lads, but you were also supposed to come out with something along the lines of ‘how can ye go wrong with the coach ye have’, to which the Canon would say, ‘ah stop that’.

“But if you didn’t say something along those lines...”

Memories and the Harty. The two have always been synonymous.