All-Ireland SFC Quarter final: History's harsh little joke on the footballers of Mayo has been to make them orphans.

There were 13,500 customers in Hyde Park last week when Mayo cashed in a distressingly small percentage of the possession that they earned. Just about 2,500 of them had made the small pilgrimage across the border. They didn't go home to spread the good word.

Pat Holmes, a servant to the county in good days and bad days, recalls coming out of this year's Connacht final and hearing Mayo people vowing they'd never again darken the turnstile of a GAA ground that Mayo were playing in.

Liam McHale, who knows better than most the caprices of the Mayo football public, is distressed sometimes for the players he works with.

"For me, in my time, it wasn't a big deal but these are young, honest, genuine lads busting their asses to win an All-Ireland for Mayo. They get given a really hard time locally and in the local media."

Who knew that it would be so or that it could be so? Disappointments have changed the personality of the Mayo football constituency like lightning strikes can sour a man.

"The mindset of Mayo people going up on Sunday is desperate," says former player, and underage manager Martin Carney. "John Maughan gets criticism and the team get criticism and they live in this environment where an awful lot of people won't travel and an awful lot of people go about saying that they just hope we won't be disgraced. I find that hard to take."

Always the bitter word. Cynicism rages through a county where hope and optimism once informed every season.

Few Mayo teams have ever been so lonely or desolate as they left for Croke Park.

And John Maughan, mysteriously, gets rocks and brickbats thrown at him. In a county which went from 1951 to 1989 without getting to an All-Ireland final, his crime has been to take Mayo to three finals in 10 years. After famine Maughan gave them bread. He's cursed for not providing jam too.

This last decade of Mayo football has been better than those who lived through it allow. The afternoons of hopefulness, the days when Mayo played with the fluent confidence that is their birthright, have been frequent.

Anyone unfortunate enough to have survived the cruel and unusual punishment of having to watch Mayo's All-Ireland semi-final appearances of 1992 and 1993 would offer a hallelujah for that much - or so one might have thought. Mayo is different, though. Mayo expects.

Mayo football measures itself not against its own failures but against its imperial past, brief though that halcyon era was. Back-to-back All-Irelands in 1950 and 1951. Four Connacht titles on the trot. The county has never really gotten over that.

They look back at sepiad old stills taken back in the time of gals and cheroots, those golden hours when Mayo men were the matinee idols du jour. It was the pictures that got smaller, not them. Surely?

And they persist in measuring themselves always, and perhaps rightly, against the franchise leaders. It's a wistful sort of pastime, though.

For Mayo, games with Kerry have represented the yardstick moments of the past decade. Both counties took a satchel worth of optimism away from the under-21 final of 1995. Since then they have met in one All-Ireland semi-final and two All-Ireland finals. Tomorrow all the Celtic crosses are in the Kerry dressingroom.

CHAPTER ONE

All-Ireland under-21 final 1995 (replay): KERRY 3-10 MAYO 1-12

Perhaps the most enduring novelty to be extracted from the drawn All-Ireland under 21 football final of 1995 was not the fact of Mayo's last-minute reprieve but the certainty that they should have beaten the short odds favourites Kerry.

A fortnight later in Thurles, as part of a double-header with that year's under-21 hurling final, Mayo wilted. Kerry made a few canny changes. Ciarán McDonald was in sick bay. The game skipped away from Mayo and if there were four points in it at the end the slenderness of that margin flattered them a little.

For Carney it represented the end of a road he had embarked on five years earlier when he began working with Mayo underage sides with the objective of providing quality players for the senior team. "I sat on the steps in Thurles that day and I said, 'well, f*** this'. It was the fourth All-Ireland in five years that I had been involved in with underage teams. I was also the club secretary in Castlebar. I had four young children. I was running from Billy to Jack. I felt that I would give it five years and see what it brought. I knew that day I was at the end. I wouldn't go back in again."

In 1991, Carney had brought a Mayo minor side containing Kenneth Mortimer, Fergal Costello, Kevin O'Neill, Ronan Golding and others to within two points of an All-Ireland minor final win over Cork.

Three years later when those teams came on stream at under-21 level, Cork won the All-Ireland final at a canter, but Carney was already eyeing his 1995 crop who though lest feted, had plenty to offer.

"In 1993 with the under-21s, we took a gamble and Galway beat us out of Tuam. They beat us badly; we went away with bags over our heads but it was a calculated gamble. We got experience out of it that paid off later."

In the drawn final of 1995, David Loughlin gave Mayo an early two-point lead but Kerry outplayed Mayo for the rest of the first half. It took two sublime goals by David Nestor to keep the Connacht champions in touch.

In the second half, though, Mayo set about Kerry with sleeves rolled up. They matched a side backboned by John Crowley, Darragh Ó Sé and Séamus Moynihan in terms of application. They got a late draw from a point by Diarmaid Byrne but should have gotten more.

"We had Ciarán McDonald at right corner forward that day," Carney recalls. "He played with a broken ankle that afternoon and never told me. He jumped down off something on the building site the previous week. I insisted on taking him into hospital myself the next week. We discovered a broken bone in the foot. I often wonder what would have happened if he had been at his best. His best at the time was nothing to do with passing, it had everything to do with scoring. He wouldn't pass water. It's only in the past four or five years he has brought the passing dimension into his game. He moved out to centre forward that day and did well but I often wonder what would have happened had Ciarán been at his very best."

Kerry beat Mayo well down in Thurles. Carney hasn't preserved too many memories of it. John Casey scored a good goal for Mayo but the dominance himself and David Brady had enjoyed at midfield was gone.

"The key thing they did was they switched Johnny Crowley to centre forward for the replay. He played on Kenneth Mortimer. Kenneth was our best defender and when he wasn't in a sense doing fire brigade for others, when he was having trouble keeping up his own side, we struggled and they beat us well."

Including replays, Mayo teams had played in 10 All-Ireland finals at various grades over the previous 10 years and failed to win one.

"I've always felt if we had won that under-21 title in 1995 a few of the fellas would have had it under their belts when the pressure came in the senior finals of 1996 and 1997," says Carney. "But defeat is the accepted companion that you have here.

"There's not a great degree of optimism about, after last year's All-Ireland and after Galway in the Connacht final this year. Nobody says it out loud but many people last week would have been quietly pleased to see us beaten by Cavan, because it would have avoided what they regard as the inevitable. That's the mindset defeats bring.

"Kenneth Mortimer appeared in 14 All-Ireland finals and never won any of them. He hurled with St Jarlath's also. Others on that team lost a fair bucketful of them as well. If we had won in 1995 or 1994 it would have stood when they were faced with crises of confidence."

CHAPTER TWO

All-Ireland semi-final1996

MAYO 2-13 KERRY 1-10

"I don't have any fear whatsoever," John Maughan told reporters as the days wound down to Croke Park.

A short or selective memory must be the foundation of courage. Maughan had been in Croke Park for Mayo's previous two semi-final outings. A three-point loss to Donegal in 1992 in a match whose awfulness still festers in the memory. They'd come in search of redemption the following summer and lost instead to Cork by 20 points.

Having no fear whatsoever delineated Maughan as either a madman or a genius.

Looking back, the odd thing is there were only 33,165 in attendance. Both Kerry and Mayo were desperate for an All-Ireland appearance and both travelled with reasonable hope. Mayo and Kerry are tough constituencies to convince, though.

The Mayo players journeyed with a confidence that was new to western teams whose repeated failures in Croke Park had become the fodder of dozens of journalistic treatises on the psychology of losing. It was pointed out often in the run-in that no Connacht team had beaten a Munster team in championship since Galway beat Cork 30 years previously. They didn't care.

"Obviously in 1996, that team believed it was capable of winning an All-Ireland from the early days," McHale recalls. "Galway had shown in the All-Ireland semi-final the year before what a good team they were and they subsequently won two All-Ireland senior titles and were a very good side. Before we met Kerry we had beaten a very good Galway side.

"And we'd came out of division three playing Wexford and Monaghan and teams like that. We knew we could match up well with Kerry because we were big and strong. I remember myself just having no fear that day, even though I was marking Séamus Moynihan which was a bit of a mismatch. I knew he was up and coming but we had no fear."

Holmes remembers the feeling of near invulnerability. "You remember what you want to remember. Nineteen ninety two and 1993 had been bad but we had been there in 1985 and had done well and brought Dublin to a replay. We'd been there in 1989 and beaten Tyrone and lost to Cork by three points in the final. So there were good memories to look back on.

"We had a lot of younger players who had come in. They didn't dwell on things. Young lads don't carry the same scars. In the league we played Meath in a quarter-final and we beat them. Meath were a serious team. Derry beat us in a semi-final but we had gone eight games undefeated and we took the momentum from that. We had a good mix of experience and youth from the under-21 sides."

The game with Kerry provided a feast of highlight-reel moments. James Nallen's goal at the end of a passing movement which he initiated was the score of the year. Journalists were still committing superlatives to their notebooks when John Madden in the Mayo goal was freakishly beaten by the bounce on a long Seán Burke punt.

That should have opened cracks in Mayo's psyche but instead they closed out the half with a sequence of three points rat-a-tat-tat and no reply. The game had pretty much gone away from Kerry when James Horan signed for a bad kick out from Declan O'Keeffe and lobbed it over the goalie into the Kerry net, surprising even some of the TV cameramen present.

And that was it. Just Meath stood between Mayo and their first All-Ireland since 1951. Meath, though, as Holmes has noted, were a serious team.

CHAPTER THREE

All-Ireland final 1997

KERRY 0-13 MAYO 1-7

Memory is either short or selective. It's ironic given what would happen in the 2004 final to look back on 1997 and think of how McHale continued his incarceration at full forward because all the speculation had it that Barry O'Shea, the Kerry full back, was perceived to be vulnerable to high balls.

"I suppose," laughs McHale, "that everyone knows I wasn't happy at full forward. I had to play there on numerous occasions. At county level you can't decide yourself. I always blame it on Micko. He would say in the papers that I would have made a much better full forward. People began taking note. If Micko says it it must be true. It didn't help my cause."

It helped Kerry's cause, though.

"The ball for the first 20 minutes in the final was all on the ground anyway!"

Nourished by their progress the previous year Mayo trained very, very hard in 1997.

They met Galway in May that year, played well and struggled through Connacht thereafter. They met the surprise Leinster champions Offaly in an All Ireland semi-final.

Holmes remembers their performance that day as the best that Mayo produced in that period. Certainly when they were hot they were very hot. They won by six points, scored 13 times and registered wides at will, 17 in all.

They went into the final hoping that the curve of improvement would continue.

The approach to the final was a little odd, though. A few key Mayo players headed towards Croke Park carrying knocks. McHale was getting acupuncture on a hamstring. Casey was troubled. Dermot Flanagan was carrying a hamstring, too, and only lasted four minutes of the final. Maurice Sheridan, the free-taker, had to be taken off at half time.

Their bodies were different but so were their minds. In 1996, they had taken a stance of almost monastic detachment from the hoo-haa around the county. They had work to do. They closed themselves off and did it.

Nineteen ninety seven was different.

"We went into the All-Ireland subconsciously believing we were going to win it," says Holmes. "A lot us went out, including myself, and we were missing the focus we needed. We paid the price. We expected to win it.

"People at home expected us to win it. We'd beaten them in 1996. We expected it to happen without making it happen. It was the first time since the 1950s that we had been in back-to-back All-Ireland finals. We would actually win. That was in our heads. We enjoyed the excitement and the anticipation. Kerry were a better team that year but I would argue so were we. Our heads were gone, though."

And on the field Kerry were better.

"The older guys on our team were feeling the niggles," remembers McHale, "plus players like Séamus Moynihan and Darragh Ó Sé were a year older. They were bigger and stronger. Séamus was in the half-back line which I think is his best position. Darragh was a stone heavier. William Kirby was there. We were horrible but they were a much better team than in 1996."

The post mortems were quiet and bitter. As Holmes says, in Mayo you are either just about to win an All-Ireland or you are bottom of the heap. They made the descent in the space of an afternoon and all anybody outside of Mayo remembered of it was Maurice Fitzgerald's last-minute point, a grace note of pure genius.

CHAPTER FOUR

All-Ireland final 2004

KERRY 1-20 MAYO 2-9

Back in 1996, Mayo opened the championship in the style that many people expected them to conclude it in. On a scorching Sunday afternoon, they went to Ruislip and struggled to get over a bruising London side. They won by six points but Sheridan, their free-taker, had a busy day, scoring eight. The Irish Times in a modest headline the next day noted that "Mayo look second rate". They did, too.

Last year Mayo began with an aperitif of exiles again. They went to Gaelic Park, New York, and while exercising to avoid deep-vein thrombosis, beat the home side by 3-28 to 1-8.

Looking back at the summer, McHale is inclined to think that everything was happening too early.

"We'd been beaten by Fermanagh in the qualifiers the previous year and we felt we couldn't afford to be 60 or 70 per cent against anyone. We were full tilt from the first weekend in May when we went to. America."

This year, Mayo were the last out of the traps in the championship. They've yet to submit a convincing performance When McHale notes that Mayo are still capable of putting in performances such as those against Roscommon, Galway and Tyrone last year, he's not just hoping, he's reminding us of how surprising and distressing last year's All-Ireland final collapse was.

Maughan has said he remembers getting on the team bus last year and noting just how relaxed his players were and commenting on the fact. He sat and waited for the buzz of Croke Park on final day to lift them and propel them.

They got the perfect start with a goal from Alan Dillon and then it all seeped away. The discouraging thing was Darragh Ó Sé, Moynihan and Mike Frank Russell didn't even start.

"Up to that Kerry game," says McHale, "I thought we played the best football of the championship. We'd broken down the much-vaunted Tyrone defence - we had 21 shots on goal and scored 18. We made ribbons of their blanket defence. We beat a very good Galway side after being six points down after 10 minutes. We beat a decent Roscommon team by 10 points in a provincial final. We'd scored 3-28 against New York in May. We'd peaked a little soon."

There it lies. Small things happen and their aggregate is history. Mayo travel to Croke Park this weekend unrated and unloved. The good days are buried, the failures live on.

Carney still wonders what might have happened if they'd won that under-21 final with Kerry a decade back. What if Casey hadn't become prone to the injuries which subsequently cost him half a senior career. Or if Golding, a star of the 1994 under-21 run, hadn't emigrated to America. It all adds up.

"The fact John Maughan is seen as some kind of ogre in Mayo stuns me," says Carney. "The biggest crime he has committed is giving people a sense of expectation. It's wrong the way people speak of him. I can't get my head around it. I played for Mayo in the '80s when winning a Connacht title was the pinnacle of achievement. John O'Mahony turned that around in 1989. John Maughan has made this commonplace. You take another manager who has taken his county to so many All-Irelands, he would deserve respect. What I see with John Maughan just amazes me."

Loved like prophets in their own land, they face the Kingdom again tomorrow, hoping to break the eternal cycle.