Gratitude for those who kept the dream alive

‘The Championship,' someone wrote, ‘has romance sewn into its centre’ and last week Mayo people, at home and across the world, felt the texture of that wisdom. And now after the brilliant spectre we’ve witnessed, we know exactly what he meant – as if with the red (and green) blood in our Mayo veins, in the deepest reaches of our collective psyche, we got to savour that romance.

For years we invested it with the kind of surreal hope that became the life-force of the Mayo supporter. And, on Sunday, July 26, 2026, Christmas arrived five months early as the great tide of green and red gathered itself to flow once more with feeling from all corners of Ireland and of the world into the hallowed precincts of Croke Park.

It was, once more, the one place Mayo people from home and abroad wanted to be. Because for Mayo, football isn’t just football. Deep inside us, in that place where famine and exile have become part of the very marrow of our bones, a curious compulsion for disappointment and failure seemed to have knitted itself into our collective psyche. Searching for triumph over sustained adversity has become part of the weather of Mayo life which is why the quest for the Holy Grail of an All-Ireland victory survived a series of incredible obstacles and continued for so long to matter so much to Mayo.

Which is why too there was almost a national consensus that to stake our claim to a place in the footballing sun even, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, ‘to keep the wick of self-respect from dying out’, it fuelled a national compulsion to get over the line. Which is why we believed that nothing else, absolutely nothing could lance the boil of successive All Irelands final defeats, no matter what.

Not being lauded as the best ever team not to win an All-Ireland. Not being patronised for a spurious media-driven conspiracy about a supposed ‘curse’ earned for a putative insult to the dead 70 years ago –as if we would. Not being teased for a consistent historic failure to get over the line by our great western rivals, Galway, a favourite to win this year’s All Ireland. Not being reviled by some of the more sophisticated denizens of modern Ireland who liked to pour scorn on our arcane rural ways – like eating our dinner in the middle of the day – and our incredible and (in their view) embarrassing addiction to ‘the old religion’.

We discovered to our cost that nothing less than an All-Ireland victory would slake this great collective thirst for an All-Ireland victory. It wasn’t enough to lose with dignity and character. It wasn’t enough to remain committed to that distinctive brand of flowing football for which Mayo has long been famous. We needed a victory to get that great collective monkey off our backs. It became a visceral need to get over the line.

I was three years of age when Mayo last won the All-Ireland. And growing up in Ballycastle in the 1950s, it was second nature for us to bask in the reflected glory of one of the giants of Gaelic football, Tom Langan from nearby Ballymachugh, chosen in the year 2000 as full-forward on the Millennium fifteen.

I saw him play just once in McHale’s field, beside the strand. He was past his prime but there was an aura of greatness about him. It was a Mayo versus Ballina Stephanites challenge match and at one point from all of thirty yards out, Langan swept past his marker and rattled the crossbar with a rasping shot.

Nearly 75 years later I can still remember the gasp of appreciation from the crowd.

Little wonder that as youngsters we imagined ourselves playing regularly for Mayo, pretending that we were budding Tom Langans, waiting in the queue to star for Mayo in Croke Park.

That fantasy was heightened one childhood summer when my best friend, Peter Browne, God rest him, arrived home from a visit to Dublin with two Mayo jerseys – one for himself and one for me – now a universal part of the fashion of the day, but then an unimagined delight.

Wearing the jersey and longing for a Mayo triumph became part of the weather of our lives and during those 75 years we have longed for and obsessed about our collective insatiable need – at once reasonable, irrational and incurable – to make our mark.

Is it any wonder that the green and red of Mayo was indelibly imprinted on our souls?

After years of almost winning All-Irelands and trying to convert so much effort and dedication into the paltry promise of some distant destiny, we were left trying to raise the long and lingering siege of pining for a win to transmute so much anguish into a glorious victory.

And suddenly against all the odds, we were there last Sunday. A brave, athletic and supremely gifted squad of mainly young players embracing a typically Mayo never-say-die attitude ready to open a new chapter in Mayo’s sporting history with a confidence and a courage that would allow hope to triumph over history.

After 15 minutes, we were overwhelmed with doubt as Kerry seemed to bask in the prospect of a casual rout of Mayo. We doubted our new heroes but crucially they didn’t doubt themselves. And the rest as they say is history.

As the crowds eventually vacated Croke Park and moved west and across the world to wherever Mayo people live and work and think of home, the compelling emotion was gratitude. Gratitude to those who kept the dream alive – the players, the managers, the supporters.

There’s something elemental about sport, something about being reduced to basics, about the impossible becoming possible, about dreams becoming a reality, about innocence being recaptured and, crucially, about reverting to a child-like state when we begin to dream again.

Because what matters is the dream, the dream that we have held on to for 75 years – that one day, someday, we would bring the Sam Maguire Cup, that powerful symbol of Gaelic football’s greatest accolade, that one day, someday, we would bring it home to Mayo, where (to paraphrase the poet RS Thomas), the bogs have 

Moods of softness when the white hair 

Of the bog cotton is a silk bed

For dreams to lie on.

And now we have. Our hearts break open with pride and unallayed gratitude and joy for living to witness this day. Mayo, Mayo, Mayo Abú.