There are some journeys you can make with your eyes closed. The road west from Croke Park after another All-Ireland defeat became one of them. Out through the city. Onto the motorway. The afternoon slipping quietly into evening as the sun hung low over the bonnet, dazzling your eyes while somewhere behind you Dublin hosted another county’s triumph.
The conversations were always the same.
What if...
If only...
Maybe next year...
Somewhere between Kinnegad and Athlone, hope would quietly surrender to acceptance. By the time the Shannon appeared, another chapter had already found its place in the long catalogue of Mayo heartbreak.
The remarkable thing is that none of it ever diminished the love. If anything, it deepened it.
Perhaps that is the peculiar gift of supporting a county that cannot quite reach the summit. The struggle becomes part of who you are. The waiting acquires its own strange beauty. You learn that devotion is measured not in the victories you celebrate but in the disappointments you are prepared to endure.
For generations, Mayo people carried that burden together. Not simply the absence of Sam Maguire, but the identity that came with it.
We became the county that kept believing when logic suggested otherwise. The county that refused to stop turning up. Every spring brought another promise. Every September demanded another act of faith.
Longing became our inheritance. I have been fortunate—or unfortunate— to be one of a handful to witness so many of those final defeats — the eerie silence of the Covid final putting me into that select group. Every one of those matches left a different scar. Even the eerie silence of that 2020 final could not muffle the sound of another dream slipping away.
You begin to wonder if the story can ever change. And then, in the space of seventy minutes, it does.
Sunday did more than deliver an All-Ireland. It rewrote an identity.
Winning after so many decades is unlike ordinary success. It is not relief. It is not vindication. It is something much deeper than either. It reaches backwards through generations, touching people who never lived to see it, and forwards to children who will grow up never understanding why their parents cried when the final whistle sounded.
A county changes. Not its mountains. Not its lakes. Not its villages.
Just its people.
There is an unmistakable lightness that comes when history finally loosens its grip. The old jokes lose their sting. The ghosts fall silent. The questions disappear. The weight you carried for years turns out not to have been part of you after all.
Driving west this time, I found myself looking at familiar places as though I had never seen them before. The same bends in the road. The same filling stations. The same fields stretching towards evening.
Only we had changed. It struck me then that victory does not erase the years of waiting. It gives them meaning.
Every lonely journey home. Every conversation that ended in disappointment. Every ticket tucked away in a drawer. Every father and daughter, every mother and son who kept believing despite all the evidence.
None of it was wasted.
For more decades than I lived in my native county, I have now lived and worked in Galway. It has become home in every sense that matters.
And I cannot help thinking of another team standing on the edge of its own story.
Galway’s ladies football clubs have spent years producing players who can stand alongside the very best in Ireland. Their clubs collect titles with an almost reassuring regularity. Yet somehow, at inter-county level, the Brendan Martin Cup has visited only once, on that unforgettable September afternoon in 2004.
The talent has always been there.
The timing has not.
Sometimes they met teams who were simply greater. Sometimes fortune wandered elsewhere. Sometimes the only luck they possessed was bad luck.
Still they came again.
Still they believed.
Daniel Moynihan has spent the better part of a decade nurturing that belief, first with underage teams and then with this senior group. Belief is a fragile thing. It cannot be demanded. It has to be earned, day after day, training after training, defeat after defeat, until eventually a team begins to see itself as others already do.
Sunday offers Galway the chance to complete that journey.
I wonder, too, if the winds that swept through Mayo last weekend carried something across the border.
Not complacency.
Not expectation.
Possibility.
Because that is what one county’s triumph gives another. It reminds you that history is only history until somebody decides it isn’t.
So get to Croke Park. Go, because these days do not come around often. Go because county victories are never really about silver cups or medals. They become family folklore. They become stories repeated around kitchen tables long after the heroes themselves have grown old. They become the moments against which other moments are measured.
I know now that winning changes you. Not because it makes you happier.
Because it allows you, at last, to stop carrying yesterday.
And perhaps, if Sunday belongs to Galway, another road west will feel wonderfully unfamiliar, filled not with silence but with songs, and another generation will discover that sometimes the longest waits produce the sweetest homecomings.
