GAELIC GAMES:WHEN IT was over Mayo people in the crowd hugged and danced like Lotto winners who'd found their ticket in the gutter, half of them unable to process it, the other half throwing an eye to the exit to make sure they could get out of the ground before someone told them it was all a mistake.

But it was all true and they could leave at their ease, giddy at the thought that they’d left the All-Ireland champions coughing in their dust.

In front of an anaemic crowd of 22,732 souls, poor beaten-down, battered old Mayo took Cork by 1-13 to 2-6 and set up a semi-final against a Kerry team that had strolled past Limerick earlier in the afternoon. That’s a worry for another day.

In doing so, they became the first Connacht team to make it to the last four since they did it themselves in 2006. Of the team that started that year’s All-Ireland final, only Alan Dillon and Keith Higgins faced the throw-in yesterday. Ronan McGarrity and Peadar Gardiner came off the bench. Andy Moran and Trevor Mortimer were subs in ’06 and they towered over everyone here.

But mostly this is a new Mayo, dogged and doughty and nobody’s patsies. They had every opportunity here to wave the game away, going 1-4 to 0-1 down after 15 minutes. Cork were all brawn and power and could have been out of reach if they’d spent more time looking for the dangerous Paul Kerrigan inside and less trying to walk the ball up the pitch.

You worried that this was the same old Mayo, pinched with the same old nerves.

But instead, they stood up. Each of them put their hand in the air declared themselves Spartacus. Moran played Michael Shields as though he was someone other than Cork’s best defender and an All Star for the past two years in a row. The O’Shea brothers cut Alan O’Connor and Aidan Walsh down to size in midfield.

Cillian O’Connor dusted his hands of his first free – a wobbler that dropped short and wasn’t touched again by a Mayo hand until Robbie Hennelly was picking it out of his own net – and ended up with six points, all but one from placed balls. All in all, Mayo spent the last 45 minutes of the game outscoring the winners of the last three national titles by 1-12 to 1-2.

Glory, glory be.

“For the first 15 minutes in general we were a little bit shell-shocked,” said coach James Horan afterwards, cool as you like. “Cork were on top, we’d conceded a soft goal and it took us a while to really play like we could.

“When we sorted that out I think we dominated the majority of the rest of the game.

“After 15 minutes the breaking ball was 8-1 to Cork, even though the boys were tackling well so we just adjusted for that and got the majority of possession around there. That enabled us to get the ball into Andy (Moran) inside, who did a lot of damage. That was a huge part of the game.”

Cork sleepwalked out of the championship here. Although they went in two points up at the break, they didn’t muster a score for 12 minutes at the start of the second half and then not once again for the rest of the day.

They played like a team who were fairly certain everything would work out just fine only to realise far too late it wasn’t going to be. They walked the tightrope without checking for a net and fell to their first championship defeat to a team other than Kerry since Fermanagh in 2004.

“You were always hopeful that you could pull it together and get a few scores and get a bit of rhythm going,” said Conor Counihan. “But it didn’t happen and Mayo broke it around the middle and won breaking ball. Players aren’t machines. You don’t turn them on and off. We came up against a different kind of fight today and we just weren’t at the races.”

In the first game, Kerry torched Limerick without ever having to reach for the paraffin. They beat them as they pleased, 1-20 to 0-10, and even had time and space for Darran O’Sullivan to score a goal straight out of a Gianfranco Zola DVD. He allowed a Bryan Sheehan ball across goal with 25 minutes on the clock to go through his legs before catching it with the inside of his right heel and flicking it to the net. The kind of goal that tells you the kind of game it was, even at that stage.

Limerick couldn’t find the fury anywhere. Sheehan and Anthony Maher lorded – lorded! – matters at midfield and Kerry had time to be as casual as they liked. At one point, Kieran Donaghy played a 40-yard crossfield ball to Colm Cooper on Kerry’s own 45-metre line and an empty stadium yawned its approval. The only drama was Darran O’Sullivan’s tweaked hamstring that had him on the sideline before half-time. They have three weeks to right it.

And so a weekend that looked like cracking the championship open ends with Kerry kicking back, lighting cigars. Cork gone, Kildare gone, one or other of Tyrone or Dublin to exit next Saturday.

Hard to escape the feeling it’s being handed to them on a plate.