McGeeney leads his county to their Promised Land

Player of the match: Keith Duggan talks to the Armagh captain about a 13-year journey to contentment

This is not a fairy story. This is not about destiny. Armagh is a place of too much soul and complex Border humour and old-fashioned sense to believe in gifts from the angels.

But in months and years from now it will be said that Kieran McGeeney was born for that famous and furious orange day in September 2002. That he somehow carried an entire army of forgotten Armagh footballers and hopes with him on his long and determined walk to the steps of the Hogan stand. The first Armagh man to lift the Sam Maguire. No matter what else he may do in life, that act will define him among his people. They will see him as the chosen one.

See, Kieran McGeeney was born in 1970 when Armagh, small and landlocked, was fearful and besieged under a violent sky that dominated the landscape of south Ulster.

And in Mullaghbawn he started playing football like every other kid. He found he loved it and he kept at it, and when he was a teenager he got his hands on an Armagh senior jersey and permitted himself the foolish dream of one day winning an All-Ireland medal in those vivid orange colours. Of doing what none of his other county men had managed in 130 years.

Strike the zero and you have the figure which stands out in his mind. Thirteen years he has travelled. In that period, most of his thoughts have been about football. Hard to say whether it has been an obsession with Kieran McGeeney, but it is safe to assume that he endured some fiercely lonely hours over that time.

And then, at the close of an unforgettable and apocryphal half-hour of football, it all made sense. Everything fell into place. Kieran McGeeney dreamed about winning and All-Ireland and set about doing it as honestly as he could and suddenly it happened.

He fell to his knees in Croke Park as the rest of us gaped and a sea of orange washed across the field.

"It's funny," he says later. "You spend 13 years trying to achieve something and . . . in life, some people want to be millionaires or what ever, other people have their own aims. Well, this was mine. And to suddenly achieve, it, well, it's not so much a feeling of elation just yet as contentment. Yeah, its contentment."

Maybe it was a trick of the light, but he swears, during the frenzy of the parade beforehand, he glimpsed a face from his boyhood in the crowd.

"I wouldn't be a great man for looking up during the parade but we were just coming round the top end and I turned my head to the crowd and I'm sure I saw Charlie Grant. Playing in Mullaghbawn, like, Charlie was really the man who introduced me to football. He just had a great love for it. He'd just tell me, go out and play, Kieran. Enjoy it, like. And I just see him at the beginning and it's amazing the way the thing has come full circle."

Because as McGeeney sees it, this history as been years and decades in the making.

"It's men like Charlie and Joe McNulty and Peter McDonald. Players like John Rafferty, Kieran McGurk, who would show you wee tricks along the way. And it all comes out on days like that, you use everything you have. And I know it mightn't be much consolation for them, but I can assure you that a wee piece of them was playing today in everyone of us as well."

At half-time Joe Kernan rummaged around in his gear bag and dug out a keepsake from that past. His All-Ireland runners-up medal in 1977, carved from wood.

"He showed us this piece of wood he was given that day and we just told ourselves that we weren't going to go back with

the same today. But I always said that if I ever got a chance to play in a final that I would die trying. And we hadn't done that in the first half. When we came out, we were a few points down and against the breeze. Our character came out when it was most needed.

"I can't put into words what this means to everyone. It is definitely the dream we were all hoping for for so long. The character these boys showed - and the football, the skill. I don't care what anyone says, the football won it."

In the most important half hour of football he will probably ever play, McGeeney became the central player, omnipotent as Armagh stepped, hesitantly and then with style, into the great sunlight. Croke Park was his Old Vic. To the captain, though, he was merely doing his job.

"Joe is a great man for asking you to ask questions of yourself. Don't look for anyone else to take the blame. Stand up and be counted. Look after your own wee square," he says.

"We just kept working and working and thank God it went right for us. I just kept telling myself to believe during those last few minutes. And we all had that belief .

"It's going to be fantastic now. You know, Armagh is a small county and not all of it plays Gaelic football. And I hope that the whole county joins together and celebrates this.

"It's a long time coming and I suppose we have been ridiculed in the past, but winning this was all we ever wanted. We just gave it our all, which mightn't be the purist's way but it was all we had to give."

As he talks, Páidí Ó Sé comes down the corridor, seeking him out. Páidí knows a leader and he takes McGeeney and hugs him and offers a few private words.

McGeeney will take this exchange and treasure it, just as he intends reserving his number six shirt.

"Didn't swap it," he laughs. "No. This will be kept safe in glass frame somewhere." To be handed around a dressing-room of future Armagh players.

This evening, Kieran McGeeney will go into Armagh and afterwards the county will never be the same again. This is not a fairy story, but it does belong to the realm of the fantastic. There are rare times in sport when you get out exactly what you put in.

That has been McGeeney's principle and, to the very end, he believed in its truth.