This was a Mayo victory for all of us

The idea of reaching more places on Friday came from the players during Thursday’s magical maelstrom. They were wrecked but they felt a responsibility. What areas could they get to if they stayed in the bubble for one more day?

And how?

The lateral thinker that is Mayo logistics manager Dessie Campbell alighted on the open-top bus idea.

A speculative conversation hardened into a proposal. Could they ride up through Ballintubber, Ballinrobe, The Neale and Cong and loop around then, like a last-minute Jack Carney pass, over to Shrule and back down to Kilmaine and Hollymount and Ballindine and Balla and, for pig iron, veer further west over into the pitch in Kilmeena, and back out of there to Westport town?

If Santa Claus himself had suggested the likes of it, you’d be wondering if he was for real at all.

Open-top buses are reared to expect homecomings that take a couple of hours to cover five miles. According to my calculations, the Galway Sightseeing Company vehicle, pressed into action with just a few hours’ notice, covered somewhere around 115 miles.

But as Santa would doubtless have told Dessie – if he sought the big man’s opinion and we have no evidence he didn’t – belief is everything.

Thus, the Sam Maguire Cup came to be held aloft in the summer air of our villages and towns, and it lifted before everyone standing out along the twisting, turning, winding roads of Mayo, a healing balm for a people who had waited too long.

Those who made it happen fused into one with those who had spent a lifetime willing it to happen. This was a victory for all of us. The people’s prize. A folk sensation. The remarkable images stormed through our phones and into permanent places in our hearts. It affirmed in us the potential of what a united Mayo, a Mayo on the march, a believing Mayo, could actually achieve.

The distastefulness of the curse is surely laid to rest now, if not by others, certainly by our own. Declare an amnesty and let us never speak of it again, even in jest. The persistence of that watery piseóg was worse than any curse.

Are they all gone yet?

The very question is laced with a glibness surpassed only by its insensitivity.

Through various roles – as a journalist and as Mayo communications manager under two different management teams – I turned down maybe a dozen requests to take part in documentaries about the curse. Could a player take part? As I told one persistent documentary maker, I’d fear for my own life if I even suggested that in a Mayo dressing room.

Did you ever spend an hour, or even five minutes, in the company of Dr Mickey Loftus or Paddy Prendergast? Or listen to them being interviewed? Those men wanted Mayo to win again – and again and again – as much as the rest of us. More, perhaps. The truest honouring of their legacy was further success. They never wanted to stand alone.

And how must the families have felt as the living links with the storied years of 1950 and 1951 became fewer and fewer and some thought nothing of wishing their loved ones away.

The only curse is that Dr Mickey wasn’t there on Wednesday evening to see Conor, such an outstanding custodian of the family name, and his Crossmolina colleagues bring the cup over the Deel river, or that Paddy couldn’t experience the joy of walking tall in the streets of his adopted Tralee last week.

Die so Mayo could win? They won so that Mayo might win.

We had Dr Mickey for 93 years, Paddy for 88. If science were further on than it is, we’d love to have had both for another 93 and 88 years.

The players have also recognised those who Sisyphused the rock up the hill – a rock that, in the WhatsApped words of Aidan Lavelle, a member of the Ballina diaspora now domiciled in Rush, Co Dublin, never, ever rolled all the way down to the bottom.

When did the rebirth begin? I believe it to be the 1983 All-Ireland U21 final replay win in Irvinestown, Co Fermanagh, an unlikely delivery suite. It is not feasible to argue that the thread started by John O’Mahony on that October Bank Holiday Sunday ran uninterrupted through to last weekend. But it did bring a new spirit into Mayo, and new aspirations and new leaders.

And the thread re-emerged again this year, stronger than ever, when Johnno’s mentee Andy Moran got in on the end of the move, Darragh Beirne-esque, and simultaneously finished something huge while starting something even bigger. And, to plunder the words of Con Houlihan, all heaven broke loose.

From the final whistle onwards, the bombardment has been unrelenting. We saw Trevor Naughton, born in Kildare but forever wrapped in green and red, run through the Cusack Park concourse to meet his Lahardane father Mick.

Their thirty-four second hug has been viewed 485,000 times on the X platform. It’s a spontaneous theatrical masterpiece that requires no explainer.

The very football from the 1936 final, carried up onto the stage in Claremorris on Thursday evening. From Seamus O’Malley through John P Kean and the Mahers and Kevin Beirne and onto his son Darragh, who wasn’t born until 2006, his precocity – and that of Kobe and Eoin McGreal – a global talking-point. Players in sustained celebratory mode no matter the setting. A green and white Neale flag hurled from the crowd up to Tommy Conroy, and him executing a perfect catch on the moving – albeit slowly – bus.

The smiles.

The hugs.

A pub in Wicklow where Mayo’s win was cheered to the rafters – one of those present is adamant there wasn’t even one Mayo person on site. A video of Mayo super fan Anne-Marie Kenny in floods of tears. But that’s not Croke Park, what fresh distortion is this? It’s Hastings Insurance MacHale Park after the coruscating Meath game earlier this scrambled summer, and her declaring ‘this is it, this is the start of it’. She is a Johnno-level keeper of the faith.

The enthusiasm of the players to bring the people in.

The strains of The Green and Red of Mayo leaking from the other room or the passing car.

The joy.

The end.

The start.