Today is one of those noteworthy astronomical ones: it is, in fact, the day on which the Vernal Equinox occurs. All over de wureld, like, day and night are of equal length today and up here in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s longer the days will keep getting, all the way up to the 21st of June. The equinox occurs twice in every year, of course, with the Autumnal version falling on the 22nd September. Why am I imparting all this information about heavenly alignments and such, you might ask? Well, I dunno about the rest of you, but I kinda like it when the long evenings return, with the prospect of Summer (not this kind of one, mind) to come. In addition, those two dates I quoted can be used as reminders for future Championship days out – the longest day is the day before we face Sligo (or London) in the Connacht semi-final and the Autumnal Equinox falls on the day after we beat the Dubs in the All-Ireland final. Trust me: it’s written in the stars.

Back down on terra firma, there’s just time to mention that today’s Indo is worth a look (only the sports pages, you can safely chuck the rest of it). There’s two Mayo-related stories: Cora’s giving out shite again about the shambles that is ladies football within the county and there’s another piece about Kieran Donaghy which partly covers the missile-throwing incident. Apparently, the county board have asked TG4 for the match tapes to see if they can identify the cretin who threw the piece of wood or whatever it was at Star. That should be an easy enough task – it’ll be the lad with the prick growing between his ears.

There are two other Indo articles that are also of interest. Martin Breheny takes a right old swipe at RTE’s sponsorship deal with the GAA and he’s quite right to do so. Public sector broadcasting, my hole – it’s for such largesse that hundreds of people are being criminalised every year for not having a TV licence. Finally, this article shows the price that Tipp’s Hugh Coghlan paid for his part on the Vins’ All-Ireland success on Monday. I saw the clash clearly – both players got a right wallop but, from the picture, you can see that Hughie considered it a price worth paying, even if he did in up in hospital later that night.