EWAN MACKENNA: It’s Mayo alright, but not as we knew them

There’ve been Mayo results like this before.

Back in 2006, as the county crawled over Dublin on the back of Ciarán McDonald’s brilliance, we glanced at a colleague in the press box and realised he’d long since given up on his work. Instead, his head was planted in his arms as he lay on his desk, unable to take anymore, and when the final whistle went he looked up and smiled through some tears of exhaustion and joy. Last year was different in the way they went about winning, but in so many ways it was the same. In the closing stages, a scan of the still and scared Mayo faces in the stand showed they were equally overwhelmed as they held Dublin back by their fingernails and against so many odds.

But while there has been semi-final results like this before, there hasn’t been a Mayo like this in a long, long time.