Clare footballer Gary Brennan says the scale of what he and his team-mates have achieved in this year's All-Ireland football championship is "huge".
The midfielder has impressed this year as the Banner county made a historic run through the qualifiers and by beating Roscommon on Saturday, they have reached an All-Ireland quarter-final for the first time in the qualifier era.
"We targeted trying to play football late into the summer and get ourselves towards August and it's very exciting for us as a group to be heading now after three wins. I've been playing football with Clare for 10 years and we've never had three championship wins in the one year. We had never put two qualifier wins back-to-back so it's huge for us now to have got three-in-a-row and to be heading to the quarter-finals," he told Off The Ball.
Now Kerry await in the last-eight for a Croke Park date. Indeed, he'd only got to play at GAA HQ for the first time in 2014 in a Division 4 League Final.
But he has very few regrets despite the long wait for success.
"I do regret at the age I'm at now that I didn't take, maybe a summer when I was younger and maybe go to America or go on Tour for a summer. But it's something I wouldn't trade for what we're getting this year. It took a while but I always felt if we kept working at it, kept doing the right things and got ourselves organised, that we would make progress. I'm just glad to see that [manager] Colm [Collins'] work has paid off."
Brennan also addressed past stories that Clare hurling manager Davy Fitzgerald had been trying to get him to switch to the hurlers.
He says such an eventuality "was never really close", although he has played hurling at club level.
"I met Davy at a function and we never even spoke about it. I think his words to me were 'I know your first love is football' and I said 'you're absolutely right, Davy'. It was never really a runner."
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