We go again. For the sixth time in nine seasons, the All-Ireland football championship has undergone a makeover. It’s easy in these times of flux to think of Gaelic football not so much as the country’s most popular sport but rather a fashion-sick old dame who can’t decide what type of hat to wear to the races. This one, finally, feels like it might turn some heads.Most of the bugs and glitches that annoyed people about the previous systems have been purged here. The qualifiers were around for the thick end of two decades and rightly or wrongly, people were done with them. The two seasons of Covid-era straight knockout still brings some of us out in chills. The GAA tried two different types of group stages but they never quite took.In hindsight, the Super-8s weren’t so bad as a concept. But they foundered on the fact that they came along when the Dubs were in their imperial phase, Pac-Man munching through everything in sight. The group phase from the last three years took too long to do too little. When it’s harder to get kicked out of a competition than to make the next round, the whole thing haemorrhages credibility.What we have now seems to tick plenty of the boxes. It’s not straight knockout, which is good. But it’s not too far removed from straight knockout either, which is also good. Win two games and you make the All-Ireland quarter-finals. Lose two games and you’re out. Hard to argue with any of that.[ Confused by the new format for the All-Ireland football championship? Here’s how it worksOpens in new window ]There is a fairness to it as well. Gradually, incrementally, the link to the provincials is being severed. We’re not quite there yet – Kerry are still all but guaranteed to have the opening game in Killarney every year. But the open draw element means they have to start with Donegal this weekend. No soft launches here. Right down to business.And for the rest of the way, the luck of the draw will add a little jalapeño to the sauce at the end of each round too. Whoever loses in Killarney could well have to go to Armagh or Derry three weeks from now with the season on the line. Or it could be Croke Park or Ardee. Or the Hyde or Omagh. Or Clones or Castlebar. Proper tests, proper matches, at the height of the summer. Can’t ask for much more than that, particularly after what the provincial championships threw up. There’s a momentum to the football championship now after so many years of it feeling stuck in a bog. The game is better, unquestionably. But it’s also more democratic, which not too many people were predicting. Dublin’s Brian Howard and Ronan Wallace of Westmeath in the Leinster final last Sunday. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho When Jim Gavin oversaw the introduction of the new rules, nobody foresaw Louth and Westmeath winning the next two Leinster titles. If anything, the opposite was the consensus. The old ways of sticking 15 players behind the ball were supposed to be the only chance smaller counties had of competing. It was feared that opening the whole thing up would only lead to the sort of ghoulish hammerings you’d have to put on after the watershed.[ Westmeath’s All-Ireland opener against Cavan sells out in minutesOpens in new window ]Remember how it was that first night in Croke Park, in the televised sandbox games? A Connacht side made up of players predominantly from Mayo, Galway and Roscommon beat up on a Leinster side peopled by a few Dublin players and lots of others from down the divisions. Everyone panicked that this was how it was going to be – big teams murdering small ones, ad infinitum. On the back of that one weekend, the four-point goal was nixed. Robert Heneghan celebrates with fans after Roscommon beat Galway in this year's Connacht final. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho But that’s not how it has turned out at all. It would obviously be a stretch to say that Sam Maguire is open to all-comers now – once Kerry get everyone fit, they’ll likely either win it or be beaten by the winners. But go through the list of 16 teams toeing the start line. How many of them would you bet against making an All-Ireland semi-final?Kildare and Cavan, fair enough. Louth’s wan concession of their Leinster title spoke ill of their prospects, especially against what we know is a far from hectic Dublin side. But run your finger down the list of the other teams and pretty much everybody has enough about them to go on a run.Which is what it’s all about, ultimately. We get so caught up in buzzwords about high-performance and win-or-bust that it obscures the point of the whole thing. This is the 140th edition of the All-Ireland football championships and so far, 70 titles have been split between two counties. Sam Maguire is simply not a thing in most places where Gaelic football is played.No, for the vast majority of people throughout the vast majority of the history of the GAA, going on a run has been the only feasible aspiration. And here we are, at the start of another go-around, with maybe 80 per cent of the field fairly sure it’s not beyond them to still be in the running when the race turns for home.Nothing is perfect in sport – and definitely not in this sport. But for once, it feels like things are in a good place here. Enjoy it while it lasts.