As has been their habit since the innocent summer of 2011, the Mayo football team hasn’t been short of takers lining up to bury and praise them in recent days.

Not that long ago, but before TV3 let alone Sky Sports started covering the qualifiers and before the GAA was routinely accused of selling its soul, a team that had contested the previous year’s All-Ireland final was drawn away to a Leinster team with one of the worst and smallest stadiums in the country, just like Mayo were to Kildare last Monday morning.

In his seminal book Moneyball, Michael Lewis observed that the play-offs could frustrate the hell out of some of the most progressive front offices in baseball because it offered such a small sample size.

While he was still in his early 20s, but sometime after he’d blazed onto the scene winning back-to-back Wimbledon titles, Boris Becker indicated just how worldly and weary he already was by that point. 

The only statline James’s critics were interested in was that he was now three from eight in the NBA finals, in contrast to Michael Jordan’s flawless six for six record.

‘Throughout the spring, June 13 had hibernated in my head… In the dressing room just before going out I spoke to the players in a group. That was something I never did. This game was different. I spoke from my heart about who we were and what we were about and what we were going to do when we went out the door, what we had to do.’ — Paul Galvin, In My Own Words: The Autobiography

We’re nearly there now, mercifully, writes Kieran Shannon.