Enda McEvoy: Mayo need closure. The nation needs closure.

A Mayo supporter waves a flag before the All-Ireland SFC final against Dublin in 2017. Picture: Piaras Ó Mídheach

My nervous system won’t be able to take it if Mayo lose yet another All Ireland final. And I’m from Kilkenny, not Killala.

Betcha 99%, maybe even 110%, of neutral readers feel the same way.

Let Mayo win, put us out of our misery and allow us to get on with the rest of our lives. I’ve been saying it for years, Joe Brolly’s been saying it for years, and chances are you’ve been saying it for years.

Mayo need closure. The nation needs closure.

Yes indeed. In the week of the publication of stylish Castlebar centre-forward Sally Rooney’s new novel, you’re reading the latest instalment in the endlessly condescending “Mayo, God help us” genre. Sorry.

Or not sorry, rather, because the longer 1951 remains the date of their last All-Ireland triumph, the more their story cuts right to the heart of the questions that still matter in sport. Is it the outcome or the struggle, the destination or the journey? If there can be only one winner, does second place constitute failure? And are the supporters whose teams don’t make the podium come season’s end by definition wasting their time and petrol money?

As my Virgil in this particular underworld, I have a real live Mayo man, my friend and old Sunday Tribune colleague Patrick Horan. More from Patrick, who thankfully reckons Mayo folk are “patronise-proof by now”, in due course.

The backstory you know. The county have not so much burrowed into the consciousness of the Irish sporting public as smashed their way in and remained centre stage, an inexhaustible source of fascination and great copy. If there’s a way to lose an All Ireland final these guys will find it. They’ve done stuff John Lennon couldn’t have Imagined.

A goalie black-carded and his replacement’s first act being to retrieve the ball from the back of the net.

The concession of not one but two own goals in the same final. Think Conor Cruise O’Brien, CJ Haughey, and acronyms.

Locking horns with Jim Gavin’s Dublin, a next-generation algorithm wrapped in two-tone blue, in four finals between 2013 and 2017, seeing an aggregate of three points separating the sides at the end of the quartet and not winning even one of them.

Letting the Dubs walk in a goal after 13 seconds, as was the case last year, and not possessing anybody with the cop-on to take the head off one of the ball carriers. Reckon Tyrone would have stood idly by in the same situation? Yeah right.

In the aftermath of last December someone computed that in no fewer than four of the eight finals Mayo have contested since 2004, the opposition’s opening score has been a goal. Third minute, ninth minute, 83rd second, and 13th second.

Talk about self-harming in ever more rococo declensions. Talk about failing to control the controllables. Talk about making it hard on oneself. The Almighty, remember, is noted for assisting those with a DIY attitude. Nor can this be some fanciful, fatalistic west of Ireland thing, as anyone who recalls Cyril Farrell’s steel-tipped Galway hurlers of 1987-88 will agree.

Yet Mayo possess an identity, albeit not a wholly enviable one. It is a quality not to be underrated. How many football counties possess an identity these days? Meath’s is long lost, Down’s also. Cork have one but it is not flattering. Kildare have merely memories.

Mayo? Think green and red, think Willie Joe, think Aidan O’Shea, think Ciaran McDonald, think yer man with the peroxide hair and the Michael Jackson t-shirt. No lack of colour or excitement there.

They have an identity. They have agency. They have relevance and that matters too.

In his book The Tipp Revival: Return to Glory 1987-94, Seamus Leahy argued that for the faithful the most painful element of Slievenamon’s slumbers was not the 18 MacCarthy Cup-less years but rather Tipperary’s annual absence from the championship conversation. They were no longer relevant.

Not so contemporary Mayo. They’re always in Croke Park and they’re always winning matches there.

“It’s something to take comfort in,” Patrick Horan asserts, “that we’ve remained not just relevant but usually entertaining and always good value for some unnecessarily ridiculous drama. I think it means a huge amount to Mayo people that neutrals are excited to see us play and that while we’ve found a necessary edge we can still deliver purist-friendly football when circumstances permit.”

To reach six finals in nine years, win none of them but keep Oliver-ing back for more is an achievement to be praised, not decried. Samuel Beckett would have loved them. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

If Mayo have kept falling short they’ve also kept trying to be as good as they can be, kept raging against their deficiencies, kept pushing the boundaries of self-improvement. And if Dublin were the most successful football team in history, should coursing them as hard and as often as Mayo did be damned as failure?

Same with the Waterford hurlers of the noughties, a similarly vibrant bunch blessed in their wristwork and cursed in their timing. Déise fans had the time of their lives during those years, even if no MacCarthy Cup awaited at the end of the rainbow.

It's a truism I’d have laughed at in my 20s but have come to appreciate with the passing of time: Someone has to lose. Sport is full of teams who languish in lower mid-table obscurity and always will, teams whose fans can scarcely even dare to dream of a day out in the big park. Not only is there no destination, there is barely a journey. Fancy being a Newcastle United fan these days?

Just to think about the 2017 final — the usual one-point defeat, as Jack Lynch might have put it — breaks Patrick Horan’s heart anew. “But if your team’s epic contribution to possibly the best final ever, and definitely in the top three, doesn’t give you some sort of pride, you simply don’t love the game. And as hacky as it might sound, Mayo people tend to have a very pure love for football itself.”

To the obvious question. Would Patrick, domiciled in Sydney since 2007, trade in the years of heartbreak for never reaching a final at all? The answer is an emphatic no.

“The sense of connection and belonging it created, especially for those of us no longer resident, was priceless. I made quick trips back for two of the finals, we lost both by a point and I regret nothing. They were amazing contests and the sessions afterward with friends and family you hadn’t seen in ages, once we all got over ourselves, were like the ones you might have after a funeral, in the best possible sense. Heady, life-affirming stuff. And no one had to die.”

By now, however, Mayo are in danger of outstaying their welcome. In the age of Twitter and Instagram, being boring is perhaps the biggest sin imaginable. We’re familiar with the narrative set-up; we’re gasping for a new punchline. We need an end to our — never mind their — misery.

One would like to imagine that if they manage to drag themselves over the line they’ll wake up on Sunday in a new universe and go on to add a couple of more Sams, with victory regarded not as a long overdue happy closing chapter but as the opening of an entirely new story.

After the Red Sox vanquished the Curse of the Bambino in 2004 they won the World Series again in 2007 and 2013. You wait 86 years etc. Mr Horan points to the Limerick hurlers as an example of how quickly things can change in sport and how a county that people once sympathised with can suddenly become the terrors of the land.

Not to put the cart before the horse, but does he accept that an indefinable little something will be lost in the event of Paradise regained?

“Yes. We won’t be defined as that team anymore. The investment by neutrals in The Quest will be gone and we’ll become just another winning team. But for Mayo people I don’t think it would change how we view ourselves or these players. It would just allow us the satisfaction of
finally walking among the other top teams as genuine equals.”

Beautiful world, where are you?