The day after. One of the loveliest things about Mayo’s All-Ireland win turned out to be their lodgings on the first night of the rest of their lives. The hotel they chose for the weekend wasn’t one of the spiffy ones out in the suburbs, it was a perfectly plain Radisson in Dublin city centre.
What the venue might have lacked in majesty worthy of the moment, it made up for in a far more tangible way. All through Monday morning, any Mayo supporters milling about the city were able to take a handy stroll to Golden Lane, 10 minutes up from Dame Street, and just soak it all in. An open house, humming along on vibes and songs and selfies.
There was a peace over the place and its people now. In a pleasing sort of way, it was all a bit higgledy-piggledy. Players coming and going, supporters stopping them and asking if they’d mind doing a picture, the buses and kit-vans being loaded for home. In the hotel bar, Darragh Beirne got someone to take a snap of him holding the cup, as if it was the first time he’d touched it in the 20 hours since the hooter. Kids being kids, whatever age they were.
You are who you are until you change who you are. Sunday changed what it means to be a Mayo footballer. What it means, even, to be a former Mayo footballer. The fact that so many of the Mayo set-up referenced the likes of Lee Keegan and Donie Vaughan and Liam McHale and all the other pillars of defiance from down the years afterwards felt properly meaningful. Those players never won an All-Ireland, but now they come from a county that does.
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It casts those teams in a different light, somehow. Keegan choked up on the live RTÉ broadcast, referencing all the years of sneering at Mayo and declaring that shop closed now. One of the sport’s great heroes was telling everyone to go and find someone else to kick around. He obviously never felt he had the standing to say it before.
They all have that standing now. The sheer tonnage of psychic weight that has been lifted from shoulders here is immeasurable. Everyone who ever played for Mayo, shouted for Mayo, cried for Mayo. Everyone who had to listen to the years of slights and wind-ups and pity. Life for all of them runs on a new track now. They’ll never set foot on the other one again.
For any of the older players still in and around the panel, what really jumped out on Sunday evening was how blessed they felt to be in amongst it. Cillian O’Connor and Aidan O’Shea were there for every gut punch, every death throe, all the way through the years of heartbreak. In every dream both of them had about Mayo winning Sam Maguire, they were playing. The fact that they weren’t when it happened didn’t erode the feeling one iota.
O’Connor came back to play a full part in it but got injured in a challenge match in May and ran out of time to recover. O’Shea’s minutes got squeezed to zero. Neither of them cared, genuinely. Chatting to them afterwards, they both gushed about the privilege of being in that room for the hour after the game with Sam Maguire in the middle of it. Nobody in history has more experience of the flipside of that hour and what it feels like.
O’Shea actually missed the cup being lifted. He had come over to the family seats in the Hogan Stand, looking for his two daughters. His youngest, Romee, was only born in January and had ear protectors on her to keep out the din. As she was being handed out to him, Jarlath Burns handed the cup to Jack Coyne. You spend your whole life trying to lift Sam Maguire and you end up holding something far more precious when the time comes.
Ultimately, that’s what gives this whole thing its meaning. It’s more than just winning a cup after 75 years of not winning a cup. It’s sharing your portion of those years with the people who mean most to you. It’s wrapping them in a bear hug when it’s over, not having to say anything at all. It’s missing the people you used to share it with and wishing you still had them beside you.
A Mayo friend showed me a lovely thing on her phone on Sunday night. Her t-shirt on for the day was one her father got made up for the staff in their family pub in Charlestown for the 1996 final, green with red writing on it. They went to games together all down through the years. But her dad has dementia now and lives in a nursing home.
On Sunday, the staff in the nursing home went all out, in an effort to make sure everybody knew it was a day of days. Bunting, flags, Mayo all the way. They did up a special All-Ireland final Sunday lunch menu, naming each dish after a Mayo player.
So you could have Conor Loftus’s Lucky Garlic Mushrooms to start, Paddy Durcan’s Winning Roast Chicken for mains, Kobe McDonald’s Over The Bar Custard & Peaches for dessert. And to cap it all off, The Andy Moran Finale – Tea/Coffee.
As she sat there in her 30-year-old polo shirt, she was as happy as she could possibly have been showing me the menu. What a lovely thing to do. She knew her dad would have watched the game and then would have forgotten it all as soon as it was over.
But she knew too that all the years she spent going to Mayo games with him had real meaning. And that the happiness she and her family and her friends and all Mayo people everywhere were feeling on Sunday night was rooted in that real meaning. Without knowing it, they had been making 75 years of deposits for the glorious cashout they were getting now.
Seventy minutes of football changed their lives for them. No going back.
