The second breathless conclusion to an All-Ireland final in the space of a week, this time the folk of Armagh and Galway left stretched.
“In case anyone thinks I’ve spent the last hour on a sunbed, this redness is due to blood pressure,” explained Oisín McConville McConville on the BBC, the fella barely fit to celebrate his fellow countymen’s triumph at the final whistle, Sarah Mulkerrins having to give him a big hug to revive him.
As anyone watching the opening days of the Olympic Games will attest, sport can be savagely cruel. We knew that already, of course, but lest we’d forgotten we saw poor souls who’d worked all their lives for their moment in the Olympic sun, only for it all to end before they barely got started.
Boxer Grainne Walsh’s interview with Joe Stack, for example, was the hardest of watches after her defeat by Hungary’s Anne Luca Hamori, her chief concern that she’d let down the people who’d supported her all along her journey.
“I just have to roll with the punches,” she said, before she welled up. Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington. And don’t put your daughters in the Olympic Games for fear their hearts will be left in smithereens.
But then there’s the other side of sport, when the good days come. Like Jarlath Senior, the GAA president, hugging the bejaysus out of Jarly Óg, his son, after Armagh’s All Ireland triumph, the Burns clan floating several miles above cloud nine. The pair welled up too, as did most of us watching on – quit lying, you did too.
To be honest here, the first half action went largely unobserved, the sole focus being on that seagull.
“The poor thing has a broken wing,” Darragh Maloney told us, so thereafter you couldn’t be fixated on the creature’s movements.
“When the seagull follows the Armagh left corner-back, it is because he think sardines will be thrown on to the Croke Park pitch,” Darragh didn’t say, which was a big miss on his part, but so un-exhilarating was that first half, the most anticipated moments were Darragh’s updates on its location.
“The seagull’s finally got off the playing area,” he told us, a kind soul taking him away, although the shame was that a physio hadn’t attended to it with a magic sponge.
In fairness, though, Armagh and Galway’s medical teams were a bit busy with their own human injury issues, a number of their players banjaxed before and shortly after the game kicked off. A game in to which they carried no little pressure.
“The hand of history is on these players,” Tyrone legend Enda McGinley told Damian Lawlor prematch. “You remember what happens in these games for the rest of your lives, even longer than that.”
Even when you’re dead, then, these mammoth occasions will occupy your thoughts, although Damien reckoned that first half was largely forgettable.
“For a long period of time, the seagull had the most room in Croke Park because everybody else was marked and double-marked,” he said to Enda at the break, and the latter couldn’t disagree. Even with a broken wing, the seagull had more freedom than the Armagh and Galway forwards.
“If you wanted a helter-skelter game like last weekend, we haven’t got it – it’s very defensive,” Peter Canavan sighed.
But then the second half put life into our viewing experience, a bit of helter-skelter madness injected in to the spectacle, the period pocked with cries of ‘HOW DID YOU MISS THAT?!’
Éamonn Fitzmaurice was at a loss to explain all those wides, the fella left on the brink of howling “Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey!”
Darragh, while still worried about the wee seagull, was also left gasping by the frenzied climax to the game, during which some poor lads had moments that will haunt them for the rest of their lives, and, well, “even longer than that”.
Come full-time, it was Armagh Abú after an Olympic effort, the Orange men atop the podium with gold draped around their necks. And Sam Maguire in their clutches.
The seagull, hopefully now in the Mater Private, could only salute him. If not with his left wing
The Hill was bouncing, joy unconfined, Kieran McGeeney even showing some emotion too. Well, a small smile. And a wink at all those who doubted him. Redemption. He rolled with the punches, and there he was, captain and manager for his county’s two All-Ireland moments in the sun. The seagull, hopefully now in the Mater Private, could only salute him. If not with his left wing.
