Cahair O'Kane: Katie Taylor and the camogs of Bellaghy - how having young daughters teaches you the real value of role models

What's the score now, Daddy? 50-46. Who's winning? Katie Taylor. I PRESENTED my scorecard to the tired 7-year-old wrapped up in her blanket on my knee as though it was fact. There's warmth in having a child look up at your eyes and absorb your words as though you're an oracle. I fear her and her sisters are already unpacking the façade. Not too many years from now, they'll start to make their own minds up about things. There is no manual for parenthood. You can swallow books whole but just like the children you're applying them to, no two pieces of advice are the same. The three of them are so different, apart from all having a baked-in stubborn streak that they could surely only have inherited from their mother. You watch them rub their eyes like cartoon characters when you tell Alexa to play a song to waken them. Where will life take them? Will the world be good to them? As a father of three daughters, I can put my hand on my heart and say on their lives that I've never suffered one single second of the mythical 'gender disappointment'. Having grown up with four brothers and no sisters, it definitely is different being in a houseful of girls. The teenage years are a bit away so it hasn't even started yet. But right at this very moment, at the age they are, you look at them and think how lucky they are to be surrounded by so many great female role models. Sure, you can go for Katie Taylor. They'd been in their beds and were back out of them in time for the first bell to sound just as I arrived home from Pomeroy on Saturday night. People talk about impressionable ages – why should you ever stop being impressionable, no matter what age you are? I looked at them on Saturday night and felt guilty, as though this TV event was filling in the gaps left by my selfishness. At 38, still driving an hour return trip to training at home a couple of times a week, then away to matches at weekends, trying to make it all fit so that work is on Saturdays and football is on Sundays or vice versa. Taking on helping the eldest girl's camogie team and then missing the last half-dozen training sessions because it clashes with your own. Yet there is comfort in the idea of it taking a village to raise a child. Ireland can be a serious size of a village. When they were asking in the car on Sunday evening where Katie Taylor was from and you're able to explain it in the context of not being far from Dublin, they can place themselves on the same map as her. And if they can see the map, they can think about walking the road. Not that I particularly want any of my daughters getting punched in the head for a living, but you get the point. It was a whole summer of late nights. Like any wee ones, half the time it's only an excuse. When we were that age, my parents hosted a card school at home on a Sunday night where they played 45 for matchsticks and at Christmas the jar with the £1-a-man gathered nightly would be contested for. The sound of Heartbeat meant it was almost time for bed but each of us always needed at least six drinks from the kitchen on a Sunday night, just to get up and see the world the adults populated. It's only when I sit here now and think that I realise just how much of a part sport played in our girls' summer. They had their own camogie training sessions during the week and then the car was filled for matches for someone, somewhere on a Saturday morning. When they go to training, they're blessed to have their own mammy and people like Kathy McTeague (one of the Dohertys), Aileen Brown (neé McCusker from Ballinderry), Aileen McGoldrick (Laverty from Cargin to her own name) and Aisling Diamond - not just to look up to as great camogs in their own right, but to treat them with such warmth, as if they're all their own. All the evenings spent around the club in Bellaghy, where they watched senior camogie, minor camogie, U14 camogie, minor football, U14 football, U11.5 football. As I write, the impending deadline is not a newspaper one, but a 6.15pm blitz in Portglenone. There were two separate weeks of camogie camp in Bellaghy, from 10 until 2 every day. The girls took such a shine to coaches like Anna Cassidy and Grainne and Eimear Doherty, all serious camogs and brilliant young women who carry their caring and empathy everywhere they go. Not that you'd have thought it watching Anna horse herself about on the edge of the square in a thrilling championship derby between Bellaghy and Lavey. Beneath the darkening skies, Turlough Hendry gave a refereeing masterclass. He let them sail into each other, and the players needed no second invitation. Of all the championship games I've seen across the codes in the last month, Bellaghy and Lavey camogs was the most physical of any of them. Not a bad belt, not a complaint made. There's the line, play to it. When they were a bit younger and I would think of what I wanted for them, I think selfishly I wanted them to be involved in sport for me. Now I want them to be involved for them. They see Katie Taylor on TV and how Croke Park was sold out to the rafters and in their young minds, there's nothing unusual about that. Why wouldn't the place be full to watch a woman boxing any less than it would a man? They will, in time, learn the truth of the world themselves. By then they'll have caught on to the bluff of me and my scorecards. Maybe, though, the truth will be different.