As the surprise hit that has been the All-Ireland Football Championships 2026 transfers from the provinces to Broadway this weekend, excitement is building for the eight counties still involved.For some teams, including Donegal and Armagh, the show was Les Misérables and has already closed. For others, my native Monaghan included, it’s The Sound of Music and we hope it will remain so for at least another month.But much as we all love following our counties to Croke Park, there are also things lost in the process. The excitement of the journey to games, for one, at least if (like many of us) you live in Dublin. Also forfeited are the chances that family and friends can all sit or stand together in the same part of a stadium. The gathering of clans in Castlebar or Killarney, or wherever, is no more: hereafter scattered to the four quarters of Croke Park, and the mercy of Ticketmaster algorithms.Hence, one of the rituals of this stage of the GAA season, wherein supporters first find their seats in the vastness of Croker, then ring friends and family in other suburbs of the ground, while waving and shouting: “I’m here!”Also gone from now on are friendly pitch invasions, not just at full-time but, as happened at the Monaghan-Westmeath game in Clones last Sunday, at half-time too, when there were more children on the field than in the stands.Then there was my colleague Seán Moran’s lovely metaphor recently when reporting on the Dublin-Cavan game in Breffni Park. Because he’s retiring shortly, he “pointed the car facing home” from a provincial venue for the last time as GAA correspondent.And of the return journey, he wrote, with a note of bittersweetness: “It’s a great time of year for driving, night holding off as late as it will ever do and in the rear-view mirror, memory of another championship Sunday glowing in the midsummer sunset.”As an exiled Monaghan supporter, I too have often made the midsummer journey “home” to Dublin, sometimes with the afterglow of victory setting in the rear window, occasionally with a strawberry moon rising in front.This has been a freakish summer for Monaghan supporters, not least because the list of venues played to date reads: Clones, Armagh, Clones, Clones, Clones and Clones.On the other hand, there have been some novelty visitors to St Tiernach’s Park, including last weekend’s. Familiar as the winding road through Ballybay and Swann’s Cross was, I had the unusual experience of being driven to the game by an in-law from Mullingar.Still on a high from winning the Leinster championship, he subjected the rest of us to Joe Dolan singing You’re Such a Good-Looking Woman, I Am A Westmeath Bachelor, and other infringements of the UN Convention on Torture, with the volume turned up to 11.It was more than usual a relief to arrive in Clones and be greeted by such reassuring old friends as the message on the Gospel Hall, (from Amos 4:12): “Prepare to meet thy God.”The prevailing air of friendliness between the two sets of supporters survived the match itself, although Joe Dolan was notably more subdued on the way home. Then, on a sweltering evening, we stopped at the well-named (for some of us) village of Newbliss and joined a long queue to buy 99s. The shop’s ice cream machine was under even more pressure than the Westmeath defence had been earlier. Newbliss’s novelties include a series of direction signs for Paris (1,060km), Lisbon (1,130), Athens (3,540), and elsewhere. I noticed on Sunday that the one for Paris is badly askew: it’s pointing towards Reykjavik. But then again, to adapt the old travel advice, if trying to get to Paris, you probably wouldn’t start from there.An exotic destination not included on the Newbliss signposts is “Sam Maguire”, although as usual, some of us were beginning to wonder if this is the year we finally locate the roadmap and go all the way.Anything seems possible under Gaelic football’s new rules. The special stroke of genius in Jim Gavin’s reforms was to adopt an element from the wacky 1970s TV show It’s A Knockout and allow teams double points when they play their joker.Trailing badly against Derry in the Ulster semi-final and again against Armagh in the final, Monaghan started shooting at goal from neighbouring parishes, at two points a time, and made the deficits vanish.But since that drama, we have had the even rarer experience of successive games wherein victories were closed out comfortably, with no need for nail-biting. This is without precedent in the lives of most Monaghan supporters.Of course, the big risk of transferring to Broadway is that it tends to be where the show ends, painfully, and sooner rather than later. Still, a Monaghan-Louth quarter final in Croke Park adds to the originality of a novel summer. For now anyway, we can dream that it may be the start of a record-breaking run.