Friday's Late Late Show reunited Brian O'Driscoll with an old friend.
O'Driscoll and Michaela Morley (then aged six) captured the public's attention in the summer of 2011, when a heartwarming photo of them in Temple Street hospital emerged after Leinster's Heineken Cup victory.
Em 2011, um dos melhores jogadores de Rugby do mundo, o irlândes Brian O'Driscoll, visitou a menina Michaela Morley (que recebe hemodiálise desde o dia que nasceu) no hospital infantil Temple Street, com a taça da Heineken Cup nas mãos. pic.twitter.com/wKOUN0T4p7
— Fotos de Fatos (@FotosDeFatos) November 25, 2017
The iconic photo was taken as the entire Leinster squad visited the children's hospital with the trophy - and Morley managed to nail a challenge to throw a small ball into the cup.
Mayo native Morley was receiving dialysis treatment due to issues with her kidneys and was waiting for a transplant, which ultimately arrived in 2012.
Morley and O'Driscoll have remained in touch since that beautiful photo was taken, and they appeared together on Friday's Late Late Show with Patrick Kielty to discuss their friendship.
O'Driscoll shed light on the day that he first met Morley - and revealed that his slightly beaten up appearance had as much to do with a night out in Coppers as it did with the Heineken Cup final.
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Brian O'Driscoll reveals Coppers mishap exacerbated Heineken Cup final injury
In the famous photo of Brian O'Driscoll and Michaela Morley, a scar is faintly visible around the rugby legend's right eye.
Though BOD did indeed take a knock during Leinster's thrilling comeback victory over Northampton in the final in Cardiff, he confirmed on the Late Late that the injury had been exacerbated by a boozy mishap with the Heineken Cup trophy in Dublin days later:
Trophy lifting was still relatively new to us at that time so we had a lot of celebration catching up to do from the disappointments of the early years.
My right eye, I got cut in the game. And then, the night after, when we were celebrating in...I don't know if people know Copper Face Jacks? The trophy was being thrown around the dance floor and it got lobbed over in my direction.
I had bad hands and it whacked me and opened my cut up again. Yeah, a little trickle of blood, a quick glance over...then "WAHEY!" and off we went again.
The story had the audience, Morley, and Kielty in stitches, and sums up the giddy excitement of the dawn of Leinster's success in the early 2010s.
(Story begins at 1:50 in the above video)
O'Driscoll would return to Temple Street with the trophy once again the following year after Leinster defeated Ulster in the final in Twickenham. The Leinster star remained close with Morley thanks to O'Driscoll's continued work as an ambassador with Temple Street.
In fact, the two have worked together on projects related to the children's hospital, and O'Driscoll praised Morley for her ongoing work at Beaumont.
The pair appeared on the Late Late in relation to Organ Donor Awareness Week, which ran from April 20 to Friday night.
O'Driscoll encouraged people to have important conversations about organ donation should the "unthinkable" happen - and Morley opened up on how transformative her 2012 kidney transplant had been:
It's changed [my life] tremendously. Beforehand, my health was so bad. My appetite was very bad, I wasn't eating anything.
I was fed up until the transplant and up and down three times a week from Mayo. It's not an easy journey for anyone to have to make - especially having to come from Mayo at the time when we hadn't the good road that we have now!
Morley continues to prepare for her Leaving Cert, with O'Driscoll joking that he probably "hadn't helped" by taking her out of school for the day to prepare for their Late Late Show appearance.
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