In the depths of their own disappointment, Kerry switched elegantly into the role of history's witnesses

We are after the most amazing week in Mayo, made all the purer and glorious for the magnanimous response from Kingdom fans to one of the greatest moments in Irish sport.

READY TO BURST: Supporters cheer the Mayo team bus on the way to the homecoming celebrations at Hastings Insurance MacHale Park in Castlebar. Pic: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile

My twelve-year-old Tralee niece Ina got her first phone the week before the All-Ireland final. On the Thursday, she was accepted into the green-and-red hued family WhatsApp group.

Her first act in the group was to post provocative green and gold imagery. When veteran members deemed this an edgy start, and suggested she consider the possibility that Mayo might actually win this one, she instructed us to ‘keep dreaming’.

Was this, we wondered, the confidence of the pre-teen and/or a consequence of whatever floats in that cussed Kerry air? Either way, she found her way into that place where our self-doubt lingers. It wasn’t too hard to find it, in fairness.

We remained admirably adult in the face of her onslaught, apart from telling her she would be expunged from the group forthwith if she kept this up. There were also off-piste discussions about uninviting her from sundry upcoming gatherings.

The counter revolution arose from an unexpected quarter, as it so often does. Murray is Ina’s brother. In his five years on earth, his loyalties have oscillated between Kerry, Mayo and John Deere. 

However, the simple act of presenting him with a Mayo jersey – ‘I had nothing else to throw on him,’ to quote his mother, Bríd, a Knocknagree, Co. Cork, woman – had a transformative effect.

From the creche came initial reports that not only had he taken to singing The Green and Red of Mayo, repeatedly, inevitably tunelessly in a thoughtful nod to the family tradition. An update revealed he had also enlisted some other local crooners to support him. 

A little corner of little Kerry people was conquered. Murray had got in amongst them, low, hard, tellingly.

Since Sunday, we’ve taken to calling him Ryano.

Since Sunday, I’ve found myself in dozens of soft and craggy conversations where the good grace of Kerry supporters has been the central theme. First, a painting of the scene with whatever reliability this narrator can muster in these overloaded days through which we’re still living.

Liam Horan with his wife Noreen, holding it together - though barely

My wife Noreen and I watched the game in the Upper Hogan (come at me now with your ‘and isn’t it the likes of you too who’d get the good seats together?’ shots, I’m gone full Jack Coyne with the chest out).

Right behind us were our Ballinrobe GAA club mates, father and son Louis and Gerry O’Malley. The O’Malleys go all the way back and there are new generations coming along all the time. No-one around here believes there wasn’t an O’Malley in Hayes Hotel in 1884. 

Louis’s uncle was Seamus O’Malley, Mayo’s first All-Ireland captain in 1936. I don’t know if on the final whistle Louis and Gerry felt the almost century-long hand of history on their shoulders, but I can confirm they felt the blubbery bear hug of Horan.

Close by was another valued club mate, David McDonnell. Ten years ago, David, then in exile in Edinburgh, listened on our Club Radio as Ballinrobe captured a Mayo U21 C title against Kilmeena. The drama of it all stirred up home thoughts from abroad. His younger brother Darren was playing and David resolved there and then to come back and play with his brother before he finished up. 

The two of them are now club cornerstones. Reminds me, even though I hugged men in the last few days I never hugged before, I haven’t got around to Darren yet. David may have warned him off, of course.

On our left, an observant, knowledgeable couple from God knows what part of Mayo. It was no day for running through our mutual friends checklist. We counselled each other through the day. The most difficult part of a Mayo All-Ireland final appearance is that moment you realise ‘oh boy, we’ve got a chance here’. 

In 2004 and 2006, resolution came pouring fast. In 2016 and 2017, it arrived with the smoothness of a multi-hour labour. I’m playing with fire with that metaphor, and males who draw on the discomforts of childbirth to make a point should tread warily but indulge me and we’ll all move on.

Once in exile David McDonnell was drawn home to play for the club, with his brother Darren and to see this day.

In that glorious ten-second air pocket before the hooter, we jumped and we hugged and we cried and we snuffled and I told myself to cop myself on and not be such a slobber and we took a break and we did it all over again.

And I remember looking around me in the early mayhem, presuming the Kerry supporters would be slipping away down the steps to begin the long, doleful journey home. Au contraire. There they were, standing up, applauding, shaking hands with Mayo people, rubbing tears from their eyes, and struggling, like the rest of us, to take in the enormity of what had just happened. It was a scene I quickly learned was repeated in all corners of the stadium.

In the depths of their own disappointment, they switched elegantly into the role of history's witnesses. Yes, it was one of the greatest ever moments in Irish sport – a folk victory, in many ways – but in the circumstances everyone would have understood if they wished to give it a miss.

In the din that shook the world, there were long silences too when the emotions simply took over. Afterwards, we all talked about how we remembered loved ones who would have given anything to be there on the win-just-once day. 

Discreet baubles have been placed on graveyards all over Mayo – nay, the world – since Sunday. Thanks to my sister Sara, my late parents Billy and Ina now rest beneath a green and red flag.

There will be a day – and likely soon – when Kerry will come gunning for us. They have a history of responding after down days. 

Threats to their citadel bring out the very best in them, as we've repeatedly seen over the past few decades. Hunter champions soon enough become the hunted. There’ll be no hugging and kissing the next time the counties meet.

And if they beat us, they will enjoy it, as well they should.

But on one transcendent July Sunday, they had the grace to recognise something infinitely bigger than all of us. 

They were the guard-of-honour 1989 Offaly hurlers to our Antrim (if that's before your time, google it – it's astonishing). A phrase I first heard from a Kerry source – full disclosure, the guv’nor here, Tony Leen – exhorts you to 'walk aisy when the jug is full'. On Sunday, the Kerry supporters walked easy when their jug was empty and ours was overflowing. 

Respect.

Eugene McGee once commented on the dignity the Kerry supporters showed when Offaly deprived them of the five-in-a-row. He said no other county would have been as good about it, deep though their hurt was. Isn’t it one of the amazing quirks of the history of Gaelic football that two of the greatest ever days – Darby Day and Mayo Day – Kerry, the greatest winners of all, were the losing county. 

And in that, there’s perhaps the ultimate compliment to Kerry’s great tradition. On the day we leapt free, it had to be either Kerry or Dublin we beat. Kerry’s magnanimity on Sunday is deeply appreciated in Mayo.

We are having the most amazing week. Randomly, having found my number somewhere online in a Mayo GAA context, a Dublin man in his mid-70s rang and asked if he was ‘through to a Mayo man – I just wanted to ring someone in Mayo and tell them I’m delighted for ye.’ 

I was in touch Sunday night with Leo Moran of the Saw Doctors, our adopted poet laureate. To mangle one of his many truly magnificent lyrics, for the cause of mother Mayo, Leo couldn’t have Dunmore. The Green and Red of Mayo runs deep.

Last week, I felt a draw to Clare Island. I have two great friends out there – Padraig, Oliver, how are ye bearing up? – and on Friday last when I got the ferry out from Roonagh, I once again felt something that might, in its own way, be close to what brought David McDonnell home from Edinburgh. 

Leo loves many things in life – dead butts, the credit union, the sixties still – and up there near the top of his list football, particularly the Tuam Stars and Galway strains. I asked him if I could use his text message here. He said, sound, sham, sound as a bell.

Here it is: “Some buzz. I was crying at the whistle. For the last two minutes, I was standing up in front of the telly shouting NOT THIS TIME, NOT THIS TIME and nobody was more delighted when it came to pass.”

We gave them John O’Mahony. But Leo wasn’t a bad swap. And we thought of John O’Mahony too, and the faith he implored us to keep, the very faith that almost deserted us in the build-up to Sunday. Except it didn’t desert the players. 

While we worried, they were plotting for greatness. They kept dreaming.

When my brother Maurice and Ina returned to Tralee on Monday, they loaded them into a van – Bríd and himself have four of them, armies have marched with smaller inventories – and hit for Mayo. 

Five-year-old Ryano was soon to be found standing near the corner bar owned by my first cousin John Biggins, waving at Mayo cars streaming through and onto Castlebar for the homecoming.

The drivers didn’t need much encouragement but they obliged anyway – they knew a hard case when they saw one.

I’m proud of the maturity we adults have shown in the WhatsApp group by offering Ina the restorative justice of an amnesty and a vow to forget her debut day. 

I’m also proud of how she still wore her Kerry top while she’s been up here for the last few days. Kerry’s her county. The attachment to a jersey, whatever the colour, unites us – all of us – more than it will ever divide us.

And, around here anyway, the green and gold has only gone up in our estimation this week.

*The author is a native of Ballinrobe, Co. Mayo, and a former GAA writer for a variety of publications, including The Irish Examiner. Last year, his debut novel On The Way Out won the Gerald Griffin Competition for First Original Adult Fiction.