Anniversary of Cormac McAnallen's death: Keith Duggan on how emotion alone could not pull Tyrone through last year, and only now, says manager Mickey Harte, are they finally ready to move on

And time shuffles on. Thursday was the first anniversary of the death of Cormac McAnallen and, like so many people, his friend and mentor Mickey Harte found himself transported back to the improbable strangeness and heartbreak of that day one year ago. On training nights of late, March 2nd had been looming in Harte's mind and among the group of Tyrone footballers that McAnallen had led up to his inexplicable leave-taking. They all had the same feelings. Could it really be a year? And equally, haven't those past 12 months seemed unimaginably long?

"It is like it has all passed in a flash but at the same time, it has been this gruelling experience," the Ballygawley man said.

Harte was in Oldcastle, Co Meath. Wednesday afternoon was beautiful, starkly cold with the promise of snow on the radio bulletins and also visible in the light dash of pink skyline that lay across the Boyne Valley. Mercifully away from the main arteries, Oldcastle has been left unspoiled and there was excitement in the town square as the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was expected.

It is local election time in Meath. So Harte sat in the auctioneer's offices of Paddy Short, for whom he now works, waiting to greet the politician. In a way, it brought back a remembrance of 12 months ago when Irish dignitaries from all walks off life paid public tribute to the 24-year-old Eglish man. He was remembered in vivid, generous and omnipotent terms and in heartfelt gestures. That day one year ago, Cormac McAnallen was on everybody's mind. His death triggered the vast emotional depths that the Gaelic Athletic Association alone can summon when one of its sons passes away and the enormous gathering at Eglish brought home the truth that the association runs much deeper than mere games.

His death cast his team-mates, the Tyrone football team and reigning All-Ireland champions, in a new and poignant light. In terms of a test, it made the stuff of championship, the hard days in Ulster and beyond, seem trivial. McAnallen's death was the opposite of the credos and truths by which this group of football players had lived by. There was nothing clear and linear about it all. It made no sense. And yet they had to - they were obliged to - carry on with the notion of being a team.

"It was a very sort of highly charged and emotional time," Harte says now. "And we all had to put on a brave face. I am speaking here in terms of outside his immediate family for whom, of course, the pain and loss was much more intense than his friends felt. We were trying to do what Cormac would have done and put on a face. And only in reflection I can see that there was adrenaline in our bones that was keeping us going all through last season. But it wasn't being replaced; it was being emptied bit by bit. And this is not to disrespect Mayo at all but when that game came around, our energy levels were low. Gone. We would have loved to believe we could have got to the final. But in hindsight it wasn't possible because our energy sources were not being renewed.

"And again, people mightn't understand that we were out playing the game again as a team, and one that on the face of things seemed to be coping and carrying on. But the individuals within that team had their own personal battle within the new dispensation. And when you put that lack of energy together, it was going to run out."

For Harte as a manager, bringing his team together in the weeks after McAnallen was laid to rest amid unforgettably restrained and dignified goodbyes in Eglish, the prevailing attitude was simple. There were very few tearful speeches and no promises to retain the All-Ireland in honour of their fallen captain. Like life, sport is rarely so simple.

"We were careful in that because we had a sad and unfortunate precedent here with Paul McGirr in 1997. Where we couldn't make it that we had to win it for Paul because as happened we didn't win that All-Ireland. So we had to be careful that it didn't become a crusade that might end up in a let-down. And the philosophy of life Cormac strove for was to do our best and I think he would be content that the boys did that in the circumstances. And it probably was in many ways true and right that there shouldn't have been celebration in Tyrone at senior level. It was great the minors won and they could enjoy that but at senior level it maybe was not a time to return to the euphoria we felt the season before. It had no place. That is not to say we didn't try to win it but on reflection, it had no place."

INSTEAD, THE Tyrone football team post-McAnallen became a curiosity of sorts. It was convenient for us all to see their early gatherings as a symbol or renewal. Sport as the healing entity. The full-back jersey, which McAnallen had worn with such distinction the year before, was retired for the season. In the first league game back, Tyrone were applauded on to the field by a gallant Mayo team and answered to some inner calling, putting on a formidable display of football. From afar, we approved of the show of strength, the clean resolve and we murmured that come the summer, the champions would be right.

In the four walls of the dressingrooms, however, it was all a muddle. Good and bad. Silences. A name often unspoken but in all their thoughts. Guys not sleeping. Guys wondering if they should even be playing. Harte was the manager; a well-mannered, stubble-faced spiritual kind of sage who was expected to provide some sort of context. And he tried to make it all seem sensible, tried to make it feel like a normal season but looking back, he knew.

"Boys would have questioned, 'is this so important?' Yes, it is nice to play football and win medals. But in the real scheme of things - and remember now the core of this team had been through this before and built themselves up after the McGirr tragedy. So there was a dilemma that this game through which they were supposed to continue the memory of Cormac didn't matter because Cormac wasn't there. It was the game he played and all the rest of it - but what does this game matter anymore? Life is so different now and life is about so much more than football. We have sport placed at such a central place in our lives that when real life is taken away, it becomes trivial. So it was that dilemma of differentiating between the triviality of a sport that means everything to you. Like the GAA is your life, that is what you say. But in terms of Cormac, his life is the person he was and his family and those he loved. He was such a loss.

"Yet I do believe the camaraderie we had is a great source of comfort to his family, as was the way he portrayed himself through the GAA and through the game. He could have lived the same good life and nobody would scarcely have known about it. But because of this vehicle of the Gaelic Athletic Association, people are aware that here was this great young life and look what he achieved.

"Without the GAA, he would have been another young person who died tragically. So we have a lot to be thankful for. But it was and remains a lot to understand and grapple with and in our team, players came to terms with it in different ways."

What it meant was an absence of synchronicity. It meant unrest. Sure, Tyrone could still sweep the field and put up scores in that pure and economic style of theirs. They could toy with opposition teams and shout and harry. But to what end? Always lurked that question mark. Whatever spurred them on was extracted not from the traditional well of pride and know-how that All-Ireland champions visit in the riskier passages of the following season. It was down to a degree of giddy, kinetic energy that found its force in their feelings about McAnallen.

They engaged in a league classic against Galway, a couple of games that ignored all the laws of time and place, just two gifted teamsgoing at it hell for leather, like schoolchildren in the yard, playing for the joy of it. Against that they were subdued against Fermanagh and Derry and then hit the wall on one of those overcast, humid days that separate Clones from other sporting towns. Tyrone didn't exactly go up in flames in their second half loss against 14-man Donegal. In John McGahern's haunting phrase, they disappeared from the sky. Emotion and fatigue overcame then and in the end they were a shadow team.

"After that, as a group, we were disappointed in each other. We felt it would happen sometime but it wasn't until it hit us between the eyes we faced up to it. We decided to roll up the sleeves then and give our best. It was Cormac's way. And from then to our defeat against Mayo was healthier. We had some good times even if we knew that the year was not going to be about football success."

Over the year, Mickey and his wife Marian would visit the McAnallen family about once a month. Ordinary conversation always found its way back to Cormac. At the recent fundraising dinner for the Cormac Trust in Armagh, Harte felt the curtains were falling naturally on the social remembrance of the Tyrone man. Tonight in Eglish, the Tyrone team will gather among family and friends for McAnallen's anniversary mass. For Harte, a spiritual man, reaching that moment feels like a kind of milestone, an achievement. Sometimes, in the car, when taking mental note of his players, he will remind himself - always with surprise - that Cormac is not there. Won't be training tonight, won't play Sunday. Ever.

This year, that has been slightly easier to get his head around.

"Adult teams change naturally each year anyway. The dynamic shifts. Cormac was the central figure in 2004. He lifted our first trophy for us. This year, the early signs are the players can cope with the idea of moving on as a new entity.

"See, for those of us who knew Cormac, he will be there anyway. Not on the field, of course, but what he stood for, what he believed in and how he carried himself will stay with all of us."

Tonight's religious remembrance will be close and private as the family and friends of McAnallen consider his absence one year on. Tomorrow, Sunday, for the footballers of Tyrone awaits the humdrum glory of a league game against Offaly. The stuff that the departed man used to relish.

Slowly but surely, this gifted generation of Tyrone footballers are consenting to what Mickey Harte calls the new dispensation. Slowly they are re-aligning themselves to McAnallen's singular mindset of being everything that they possibly can. Slowly they are coming around to playing again the way they played in Cormac McAnallen's lionhearted days, when they were all that bit younger and the game held all the answers.