Winning made the journey all the sweeter

There is a question I have been answering my whole life. It comes in different forms and accents, from Dubs in work, from the sons of Kerry judges in college, from Kilkenny people in the boro who never lost anything they thought, from a Venezuelan friend.

They all wanted to know it. It is always the same question.

Why Mayo.

Why do you support them. Why Ciarán McDonald, why Crossmolina, why are you wearing that jersey, why do they keep losing, why, why.

I thought you were from Kilkenny.

I never had a good answer, always a blush and a “because my dad”, because family, because McD was the greatest joy, because five-hour car journeys in summer to stay in Ardagh, because Kobe is Granny’s neighbour.

I told myself I didn’t care about Shefflin or winning.

Kobe Kobe Kobe 

Friday 

Wedding in Cavan for two Mayo cousins and shouts of Up Mayo and maybe they have a chance. Two Galway in-laws buying rounds at the table say no chance, go way out of that, laughing.

Kobe is off to Oz sure, you’ll never win it.

Serious football people think if we keep it tight it will be good and build for next year, honourable defeat, an attitude built on embarrassing losses and hope for dignity.

Ellen thinks it's the year.

A hammered farmer cousin says Kilkenny has land for farming, try farming on stone in Mayo and you’ll see madness.

Kobe Kobe Kobe 

Saturday 

Oisín flew in weeks ago, home to see Kobe play, Mam thinks it was to see her, two jumbo jets in the night crossing paths.

He wasn’t coming home, what for? He’d been clear about that for years, and he’s right, he’s better over there, he has money, he has an Italian girlfriend, he talks now about looking after our kids someday like a man with a future in his hands haha.

But he was home for this, home just in case it happened.

At one in the morning outside Baggot Street we hugged like we hadn’t since we were babies, and he said it into my shoulder, very quiet, like a thing you’re not allowed to say out loud:

They could do it.

Caroline was the same. Back from Canada, home so she could see her dad seeing it, so her uncles could see it, just in case.

Funny the lengths people will go for a maybe. Flights across oceans for something that had spent 75 years finding ways not to happen.

Coppers, obviously. Paddy in his vintage Genfitt gensaí.

Eoghan McLaughlin was in it. Why’s he dropped, why’s he here, we’d seen him hug James after the semi-final outside McGrath's and we would see him crying in the stand the next day, so whatever the story is, he’s in it with the rest of us schmucks in the smoking area hoping it can happen.

Kobe Kobe Kobe 

Sunday 

I’d got my ticket outside the ground from our local Mayo GP. He’d given it to me because Mam trains his daughters in camogie. A Mayo man in Kilkenny giving it to the son of a Mayo fan in Kilkenny. He wanted to talk about Ellen’s job as a doctor, but I was only half listening, desperate to get in and sit down. Public health can wait, Mayo were about to play an All Ireland final.

Pat O’Neill spent the whole weekend shitting it, he said, about the parade.

Random Kilkenny seat allocation had him beside me. Three lost finals at centre back and he still thinks of them more than the wins, imagine thirteen, I said.

The parade was a big moment. The warm up was too long, that was a big moment. Every miss all first half had been crucial, Ryan was the main man, everything was big moments and big moments until the phrase stopped meaning anything at all.

The nerves weren’t about football. They were about whether we’d have to go back to answering the question.

Why do they keep losing.

Embarrassed.

The bad start. Of course a bad start.

The wides, all the wides and dropped short and groans and aghhh.

Jordan on a yellow with an hour still to play.

Thirty years of gut feeling telling you that you know how this goes, you’ve seen this before, go away and drink cans outside McGrath's and console each other with Grainne and Nicola.

And then they just wanted it more, we all did.

There’s no word for it, just a feeling, a wave of white, like a wave of medicine entering your body to get rid of a fever and calm you down and stop the pain.

Paudie tried to win it on his own and couldn’t. They beat Clifford at his peak.

Wasn’t Ryan amazing. And Jordan. And Loftus. And all of them.

And they wanted it more, all of them did, the whole stadium of us, because when it ended there was nobody in green and gold streaming for the exits.

There were no Kerry people leaving early. There were no Kerry people there in the first place.

There was only us.

Joe Molloy and his Mayo dad, James Lyons had his tears and backslaps, the little twelve-year-old running for his dad beside me.

Kobe Kobe Kobe.

What I felt at the final whistle wasn’t what I expected.

An intense feeling of relief and joy and no way to cry it out.

All around me it was coming out of everyone else.

Ran around to the back of the Hogan upper and Mam was crying and talking about the year I was born and her wedding in ’89, all of it at once, as if the whole of her life of living with these Mayo loo las had been queuing up behind this result.

Kobe was with James underneath us on the pitch.

Dad was telling a complete stranger in the Hogan Stand about ’96, about carrying me over the turnstiles, about me starting to cry at the noise and wanting to go home, he persisted and we got in, and they lost of course. Not today.

The stranger was clasping his hand like they’d built something together and shouted Up the West.

Captain Coyne said "stick your chest out" and we all listened.

Kobe Kobe Kobe.

Chest out 

Out onto the street and a guard from Dundalk appeared, a man Dad worked with, drank with on the border in the Eighties.

It’s been twenty years he said since they’ve seen each other but really it’s been forty, and they were hugging, and the guard’s son, my age, was taking a photo of the two of them for his mother.

There were tears everywhere. Aine had a great video and a big hug for us all.

Mam ran over to James Nallen to tell him she knew his father, and he hugged her and thanked her with a big smile on him. He looked lean and fit enough for Clifford.

Joe Brolly and Pat Spillane came out and people shouted at them and laughed and slapped Spillane on the back and told him he was a bollox, which he loved.

Tomás Ó Sé said well done and kept the head down.

Sean got a hug outside the Croke Park Hotel that was for all the tickets, all the years.

James said he met Kobe.

V gave a grin and smirk, Anita was famous on telly for crying already, Netley crew were going mad. Peadar Flynn stood there hugging Dad and telling us, my son’s a legend, and nobody argued.

Dad kept shouting Up the West at random strangers on the road and they shouted it back, hugs off people we’ll never see again, chests out.

Saoirse was there for her first match in Croke Park. She was laughing afterwards, looking around at the chaos she’d somehow found herself part of. She’s going to have to invite all the cousins to the wedding now. There’s no getting out of it. Eoin was laughing in disbelief.

People were just smiling.

Someone shouted 'it’s the bus'.

We all turned and saw it and the shine of glorious white, Declan straight over in front banging on the window and making it stop.

Suddenly hundreds of people emerge from pubs onto the street, the lull gone and the white wave is roaring again as the players bang on the window back at us and the bus driver slams the horn.

Wild.

Like caged animals being allowed out after 75 years of being kept quiet.

We met Edward on Camden Street, looking older and stronger, not the baby I visited growing up.

Chests out and blazing.

Kobe Kobe Kobe 

The Weeks After 

It’s taken me two weeks to write anything about it.

I’ve sat at the laptop every day welling up at Instagram reels like a man with a condition.

Yanks in work say I look tired, Caitríona and Ellen say the WAGs are putting up better content than the players.

All those years of why, why Mayo, why do you keep going back, and I used to think there was no answer, that it was just a thing you were born into like an accent and can’t give up.

And then I watched Dad, who once carried me over a turnstile so I wouldn’t miss a match I cried through, stand in the Hogan Stand and weep openly in front of strangers.

And I watched a twelve-year-old boy who plays for Ballintubber and loves the O'Connors run through a crowd alone to find his dad at full time.

And I thought:

That’s why.

That’s the whole answer.

It was never about winning.

It just took winning to see it.

Kobe is in Oz and Oisín is still in Kilkenny, nothing will ever be the same again.

Monday my mother in law Mary rang. Her nephew’s wedding had been the Friday before, but now she wanted us all out for drinks just to bask in it for another evening.

Caitríona came too, they hadn’t seen each other since our wedding.

We all toasted Mayo together and laughed about all the messages and texts from strange people congratulating us.

When all we did was be from a place.

Mayo have Sam.