Paul Fitzpatrick: This rainy season has been a long one for the Cavan football fan

Cavan players celebrate beating Donegal in the Ulster final last month. Picture: INPHO/Morgan Treacy

The smoke has finally cleared and Cavan supporters are content again. It was a rough ‘go-through’, as they say in these parts, that last quarter-century or so but at last, we can put it behind us and say that Cavan are back where they should be.

Now that everything is well again, Cavan fans have found themselves taking stock, adopting the air of someone assessing the damage after a tropical storm.

This rainy season has been a long one for the Cavan football fan. These things are not supposed to go on for a generation or two.

Sure, there have been fine days but not many. Then again, maybe you appreciate the sunshine more when you rarely see it.

Following the Cavan team is a sort of birthright around here. It’s what we do. No other pastimes have roots so deep. From a young age, it is the footballers who dominate our conversations.

Exhibit A: The most jealous I ever was — apart from when Monaghan won the Ulster final in 2013 — was when my brother came home from the mart when I was about 10 and told me that Bernard Morris, centre-back and one-man army, had bought one of our calves. And he had the honour of handing the great man a tenner as a luck penny.

You remember those things. When you’re in deep, the matches and all that go with them are like landmarks along the road, signposts through childhood and adolescence.

A friend of mine made his first Holy Communion on the day Cavan played Monaghan in 1988. They sped from one church, the Cathedral of St Patrick and St Felim in Cavan to that of St Tiernach in Clones.

I like to think he says that he was introduced to two sacraments on the same afternoon.

I was 13 in 1997, watching from the O’Duffy Terrace. It was the same goals into which 21-year-old Jason O’Reilly scored the winning goal in the Ulster final. ‘Jayo’ did a Ravanelli afterwards, pulling his jersey over his face. Later, a few players appeared on The Late Late Show, VCRs whirring on record around the county.

Cavan football was having a moment. But, with apologies to U2, they got stuck in it and couldn’t get out of it… Getting on a mini bus outside McCaffrey’s pub in Redhills, my home village which backs up against the Monaghan and Fermanagh borders, to travel into Clones, the last comment I heard was from a local, having an early pint.

“If they win, there’ll not be a tap done for a week,” he announced.

And he was right — but the hangover stretched on for 23 years, you could argue.

More milestones. Getting sun-burned at an Ulster semi-final in 2001, the day before attending a Debs. The photos — think freshly-pressed tuxedo and scorched flesh — bear witness.

In 2004, the shop at the back of the stand ran out of drinks at half-time. I was 20, the head fuzzy from a 21st the night before. A can of something would have been nice.

You know the way a song can transport you back in time? For me, for that day, it’s Depeche Mode, ‘ I Just Can’t Get Enough’. It was still ringing in my ears from the party and I can still hear it when I think of McConville coming up on the right and clipping over the winner.

“We slip and slide as we fall in love but we just can’t seem to get enough…” It’s a fitting soundtrack for fans who have been gluttons for punishment. In 2006, after five wins in a row, we ‘only’ had to beat Waterford to get promoted to Division 1. The year before, Cavan had put seven goals past them, Mickey Graham bagging four.

Cavan manager Mickey Graham after the Ulster final win. Picture: Philip Fitzpatrick/Sportsfile

In the match programme, someone noted that a home defeat would be “the biggest disaster since the sinking of the Titanic”. Down she went… The period from about 2009 to 2012 was the worst.

I remember my first time in Cork, for a qualifier match in 2010 against the All-Ireland champions in waiting. The night before, I sat in the hotel, rain hammering the window, watching the rolling TV coverage of the Raoul Moat stand-off in Newcastle. On Saturday, Cavan took to the field. Neither ended well.

That night we drank too many pints in Dan Lowrey’s. I woke up the next morning with a headache from hell and a flat tyre. With nowhere to get it changed on a Sunday, I drove the long road home on my space-saver spare at 35 mph. Cheers, Cavan.

There was a qualifier loss in Aughrim, after which the board publicly confirmed that players had attended the Oxegen music festival the day before. The Kildare debacle in 2012. Hockeyings at home to Longford and Antrim. For the first time, the crowds began to fall away.

By then, I was working in the paper, attending the games as a journalist rather than supporter. It was hard to write about — but, at the darkest hour, a chink of light. The underage teams started to win, then the seniors began to climb up the league rankings.

They were competitive again, floating around the top 10 in the country. Last year, they made a first Ulster final since 2001.

(Incidentally, I was at that, too — with a few minutes to go, an old-timer beside us called loudly for the-then manager Val Andrews to bring on the current one, “Mickey Tricky” as he called him, much to our teenage amusement.)

And then came last Sunday week. What did it mean? The world. To understand, you must go back a century or more.

Cavan people have never had things easy. On the most fundamental level, the land is poor, as former GAA president Aogán Ó Fearghaíl commented last week: “It’s all hills with water at the bottom”.

Shout it from the rooftops. Construction workers in Cavan town get the passing traffic into the mood for the upcoming All-Ireland semi-final, the first the Breffni county has played in 23 years. Picture: Lorraine Teevan

The county was among the worst-hit for emigration, continuing to haemorrhage young people, usually to the UK, even after other neighbouring counties had seen the decline in population ease up. The constant there was the footballers, who owned the first half of the last century. And although our success dwindled in tandem with our numbers, the interest never waned.

From when we won our first All-Ireland title in 1933 till we landed our 38th Ulster title in 1969, Cavan lost a third of its population. That figure wouldn’t begin to rise again until the mid-1990s.

So, there are Cavan people everywhere. Chances are, you will know some and will associate them with a deep obsession with this football team. You will have noticed that they’ve grown a few inches taller in the last couple of weeks, too.

In an interview last year, Galway great Joe Connolly described his county’s 1980 All-Ireland hurling success as “mending broken hearts”. There was, he said, “a sort of a Risen People about it”.

Cavan’s win in 1997 was the same, as was 2020. Now, here we are, 70 minutes from an All-Ireland final and the people have gone out of their heads again.

The Cavan fan’s love of football may be unrequited at times but it endures. And we just can’t seem to get enough.

- Paul Fitzpatrick is the sports editor of The Anglo-Celt and, before that, a long-suffering Cavan supporter since childhood