Four-and-a-half years after he retired from inter-county football, and just three months shy of his 40th birthday, Tomás Ó Sé has called time on his club football career.
Ó Sé was part of the Nemo Rangers team which last weekend lost to Galway's Corofin in the All-Ireland club final. It was a heavy defeat for the Cork side - 15 points by the final whistle.
Writing in his Irish Independent column, the Kerryman said that his boots have been stored away for good.
"When something like that happened in the past, I couldn't wait to get back out on a football field to rinse the experience away," Ó Sé wrote regarding the defeat.
The mantra was always that you'd learn from your mistakes, take some kind of mysterious strength from the bad days when you just didn't show up.
But that option isn't open to me now. The boots are put away.
Ó Sé, who joined Nemo a year following his inter-county retirement, boiled Nemo's defeat down to simple terms: "We were sh*t; Corofin were sh*t hot."
A primary school teacher in Cork, Ó Sé plans to retain some involvement with Nemo Rangers.
"For 25 or 26 years of my life, I've been playing senior club football. And I think I underestimated what that meant to me, what it did for my health, physical and mental. Football, basically, has been my life. Now I've to set out on the journey to start a new one."
