Mayo have not won many All-Irelands. A mere three compared to Kerry's 30. But our passion for the game, our unquenchable conviction every year that this will be our year, and the epic status that we invest in our heroes, suggest a far more prolific harvest of titles than is the reality.

The first game I witnessed in Croke Park was as a 13-year-old when my father brought me to the 1967 semi-final. Mayo had just beaten the legendary Galway three-in-row team comprehensively in the Connacht final and I approached my first pilgrimage to GAA headquarters with the naive assuredness of my tender years. As it turned out the Mayo team on that day was equally naive and were soundly trounced by a vastly superior and more street-wise Meath. It was a rites of passage experience for me and the start of a trail of tears as a Mayo supporter.

Mayo returned to Croke Park in 1969 with a team different in almost all positions to the 1967 team and were beaten by just one point by Kerry in a thrilling game. This was to be a false dawn, however, for it was to be over a decade before we made that journey again as Mayo went through the barren 1970s without winning a single Connacht title.

However, we are nothing if not resilient and none of this seems to matter as thousands of red and green-clad supporters emerge for the start of each championship season. Win one match and people are travelling from Manchester and London, Los Angeles and Boston.

My own father played in a minor All-Ireland final during the second World War on a team that included the legendary Sean Flanagan, who was later to captain Mayo to double All-Ireland victories in 1950-51. Flanagan, as it happened, could not play in the final as he had just entered Clonliffe College for the priesthood, although he could hear the roar of the crowd from his dormitory window. Mayo lost that minor final to Kerry.

We are reared on such stories in Mayo to the point where our past heroes grow to mythical proportions. In truth we have often dreamt too much, with the result that we have invested too great a burden of expectation on our current heroes. This has always made their failure and our disappointment all the greater.

When you occupy a piece of ground that clings to the Atlantic, but where the biggest industry has often been servicing the emigration trade, you need your dreams and your heroes. Good land is so scarce in some parts of the county that in one parish on the north Mayo coast the Gaelic playing field is located on the local beach. But there is a playing field.

Now we are within tantalising reach of a new generation of heroes. On Sunday next I will be there with my 13-year-old son. He was not born in Mayo, but he has travelled with me to bleak provincial venues to witness Mayo plough through a turgid second division campaign this past winter. We, like the team, had to do that to exorcise the ghosts of last year. We have done that. We are back at the summit and we have unfinished business at Croke Park.

On Monday next, if Mayo win the Sam Maguire for the fourth time, I will travel West. I have visualised the victory procession. It has never happened in my lifetime of 43 years. It may never happen again. But if it does, this once, I will die happy.

(Dan Loughrey is Group Corporate Affairs Director of Aer Lingus.)