CRAWLING through the rows of rhubarb ‘n’ custard houses waiting for Davitts’ ground to appear out of nowhere.
Ireland’s shortest pitch at Aldergrove, over a mile away from where your Sat Nav tells you it is.
Cargin bringing a team for the first half and an entirely different team for the second.
Going to The Bear Pit with 12 men as Sarsfields line out their full 15.
Sunshine and space and scores in Glenavy.
Antrim club football is a different experience alright.
All of those experiences last year were for Ahoghill’s reserve team.
After much soul-searching, I threw my lot in with them just before the start of last season.
Playing for Drum on Sunday afternoons was no longer an option.
Antrim offered Friday night games. Ahoghill offered everything you’d look for in an adoptive centre for Footballers Who Can’t Kick Good.
I ended up inadvertently standing in for one senior championship group game last year.
In a rare appearance at training the week before it, I told the players that having studied their league game against Portglenone, my thoughts were quite simple: I’ll kick the ball away from Niall McKeever.
The game is 90 seconds old. First ball on the tee. McKeever’s right in the middle of the pitch, standing 8 foot 3″.
First kickout, right on top of Niall McKeever’s head.
On Sunday past, with Chris McGlone having scraped through the barrel and found the arse of it, I played my first (and probably last) Antrim senior league game for the club.
It was only days after I’d committed to playing that the fixtures were released.
Cargin, away.
Lovely.
The great unspoken of being a sports journalist is that a lot of what we see is a lot of what you can see for yourself.
This weekend, I’ll be in Mullingar to watch Westmeath host Down in a crunch Division Three game.
For those 70 minutes, perched at the back of the Cusack Park stand, the press box perspective will be no different from the supporters sitting three feet away.
We judge teams in the same way supporters do. The ability to go down afterwards and probe managers and players, trying to unpick some golden nugget from the conversation, is the only real advantage.
In terms of the inter-county game, there’s footage you can study and sometimes from behind the goal, which is helpful.
You can pick brains but, on the outside, the best you’ll get from anyone is an educated guess.
There’s no better perspective from which to try and understand a team than being on the pitch with them.
It was the first day of the new league season in Antrim.
Turning in the gate, the main pitch has had its haircut but the flags are down below on the bottom field.
That’s where the game will be played, dictated to by a gale that would blow straight into Ahoghill’s faces in the first half.
For 30 minutes, and I’ll be completely honest here, I was probably in awe of Cargin.
They came out really strong, a team with Mick and Tomás McCann, Pat Shivers, Kevin O’Boyle, Justin Crozier, James Laverty, the two Gribbins, Benen Kelly, John Carron, the whole works.
I’ve watched them I don’t know how many times in the last ten years as a reporter, as a match-going fan, on streams and on TV.
But it’s a whole different thing when they’re standing there lined up, 14 of them squeezed into your half of the field, organised in very deliberate patterns, laying traps so that even if you can find a man with a kickout, they’ll converge on him in a pack of three or four and wrap him up.
They’re brilliantly organised in terms of their kickout press.
The physicality they bring to the game is matched by their discipline in the tackle.
There were times we thought they got a few soft frees but even the way they know to grab hold of the defender’s arm and lock it in to fool the referee, you had to admire it in a way.
It was complete gung-ho stuff but delivered in such a manner that they felt in control of it, even if they were almost caught for goals twice as a result of squeezing up so high.
Ahoghill fought back from ten points down at half-time to get within four at the final whistle.
Only a brilliant goal-saving block from Ronan Gribbin to deny Conor Crossey saved them from a really nervy finish as they battled against the same wind.
But in 30 minutes on a field playing against them, I learned more about Cargin than I had in ten years of watching them.
The work that Ronan Devlin, Fabian Muldoon and Kevin Doyle have carried on was started by Damian Cassidy, whose tactical approach took time to settle in.
There was one championship game a few years ago where he wasn’t long in, they’d drawn with Lámh Dhearg and he sat with me on a bench outside the changing room pulling his hair out, wondering if what he was trying to implement would ever bed down.
It did, and has been tweaked accordingly by his successor Devlin.
What I’ve found watching more Antrim club football in the last year is that it looks really enjoyable to play.
Too much so, in some ways.
For most teams, the first pass is always forward. There’s not as much of the recycling stuff and slow build-up as you’d see in other counties.
They also play an extraordinary amount of games.
Dual players in Ahoghill, which is almost a complete majority, could play between 35 and 40 matches this year.
Standing on the hill in Dunsilly last year watching Dunloy and Portglenone trade punches in an unforgettable football semi-final, it was brilliant viewing and yet felt inherently naïve all at the same time.
There was no doubt Dunloy had the quality but I always felt Cargin would win the final simply because they are tactically ahead of the rest of Antrim.
They’d know that Dunloy might beat them by scoring 3-7 but they wouldn’t hit 0-16, so drop off and cut out the goal threat.
Even with 14 men from fairly early on, their nullification of that space down the middle was a different way of playing.
It’s where the rest are still chasing Cargin.