From the Wexford team that suffered a 13-point pasting from Dublin at Croke Park three years ago, as many as 11 of them featured in yesterday's Leinster final win.
The emergence of Dublin and the arrival of Galway in Leinster a decade ago pushed Wexford to the margins in the province to the extent that their outings in Croke Park have been quite sparse over the past 10 years.
After the 19-point loss to Kilkenny in the 2008 Leinster final, they didn’t play another game there until the opening round of the 2016 Leinster Championship.
It turned out to be a damp squib as Dublin coasted to a 2-19 to 0-12 victory in what was Liam Dunne’s last season in charge of Wexford.
To gauge just where that left Wexford in the pecking order, it was Dublin’s only victory of the campaign and they were well beaten by Kilkenny the next day out before losing to Cork in the qualifiers.
Wexford managed to score a surprise victory over Cork themselves in the next round though Waterford beat them at their ease by 10 points in the subsequent All-Ireland quarter-final.
Remarkably, Davy Fitzgerald guided Wexford to a Leinster final appearance the following year, losing to Galway, before inspiring their first provincial title in 15 years with yesterday's defeat of Kilkenny.
Of the 18 players used against Dublin three years ago, eight of them - Liam Ryan, Matthew O’Hanlon, Paudie Foley, Diarmuid O’Keeffe, Jack O’Connor, Paul Morris, Liam Og McGoveen and Conor McDonald - started both that game and Sunday’s Leinster final.
Harry Kehoe also started that game and was introduced as a sub on yesterday, while David Dunne and Cathal Dunbar came off the bench in both games.
Indeed, there would have been 12 Wexford players common to the two matches but for an administrative cock-up which prevented Lee Chin, who was returning from injury at the time, from taking his place on the bench that day.
Speaking last year, Chin recalled: “I was in the hotel for a pre-match meeting and Liam just called me into a room and said, ‘We've made a bit of a mistake and we weren't fully aware of what the rules were and we haven't named you on the team-sheet therefore we can't tog you out’. That was pretty much the conversation.
"You like to think if you were on the field it wouldn't have turned out that way. It was frustrating enough sitting in the stand knowing potentially you could have played, not being allowed to play and then to see us bet by a cricket score. It was a bad experience.”
If you haven't already, be sure to like our Irish Mirror Sport and Irish Mirror GAA pages on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
