OISÍN MCCONVILLE offered his familiar crooked grin when he was asked if Crossmaglen have been spurred to another Ulster title by the notion that their magnificent run must soon be coming to an end.

“Not really. Why, are yez waiting on the end?” he asked in surprise. “Naw. We aren’t worried about that. You saw what we took off the bench today. There is some competition for places. Look, for me this is going to come to an end shortly but hopefully not for another couple of years because I am enjoying it. But we have such a conveyor belt of talent that we feel that we are going from strength to strength. Like Jamie Clarke. I would expect to see him playing county football next year. Because he is special. But we have plenty of other boys like him.

“Kyle (Carragher) came on and scored an exceptional point. We have five or six on the bench. It is a hard road. We are preparing for an All-Ireland semi-final now and we deserve it because we worked really hard. I suppose it makes it all the sweeter when you have worked harder.

“We had a long hard slog in the winter. If you lose today’s game, it’s a terrible one to lose ’cos you put so much into it and you possibly come away with nothing.”

Only this year has McConville’s remarkable durability come under strain. For years, he lined out with the Rangers year in, year out, seemingly impervious to injury. On this form, he will be there for some time to come. He is still lethal from placed balls and contributed two nippy points from play in a match were scores did not come cheaply.

He grinned cheerfully when it was pointed out Crossmaglen had now managed their first three-in-a -row in Ulster.

“Yeah. Every year someone comes up with something different in terms of records. That is great. It gives us something else to focus on and think about. We never mentioned records or the three-in-a-row until we got here and now we have it. But look, this is a passage through to the All-Ireland semi-final. We will be back training in early January – well, maybe mid January – for that and we hope we can go a bit better than we did last year.”

Out on the field, Colin Devlin shook his head as he considered the fast and ultimately joyless experience of playing the Ulster champions in residence.

“They are a hard team to beat as everyone knows,” he said ruefully, shaking his head as if he was stating a fact he swore to himself he wouldn’t have to state. Much as Ballinderry promised themselves that they wouldn’t fall into the trap that previous teams had, they found themselves in the same inescapable place.

“I thought we were right back in it when we got the goal but I don’t even know if we scored after that. Other teams might get rattled after giving a goal like that but they just kept cool and rattled over points and kept on going. Ah, there are that many things you could look at. Reading all the papers, you would think we had some kind of game plan. We escaped out of jail and came out to perform. But we probably played worse than the first day. That is it. It is disappointing. These opportunities don’t come around too often. Well, for Cross they do. But for the rest of us, you might come back next year. Or it might be 10 or 15 years.”