Early yesterday, Markievicz Park was a pulsing, teeming little amphitheatre, mist and mountains for a backdrop, local optimism drifting about the ground. By 5.00 p.m. it was emptying and desolate, the scene of a new low for Sligo football. Mickey Moran finds himself standing at pitch-edge trying to apply some reason to what was an unprecedented collapse.
"We were destroyed," the Sligo boss declares flatly. "End of story." For all the cloudy rhetoric about dreams and passion that flood all aspects of the championship, Moran is, like all GAA managers, grounded in realism. A county can aspire to a better place and, just when they seem within touching distance, something like yesterday happens.
You can run for years without finding any redemption. Four years the Derry man has been with Sligo. Countless hours spat back in one brutal day. Where does he go from here? "I'm going for dinner and then I'll head home," he says.
"This is just a personal thing for now. I've had four marvellous years here with lovely people and I am sad and hurt now. I can hold my head up high. I remember coming to this ground four years ago for a National League game against Limerick.
"I wondered had the crowd not turned up yet because there were about 50 people in the ground - I could see my own family across the way. There was no stand here then and we took 150 punts at the gate. So, we've come a long way from that and we've a long way to go."
There is little pleasure to be gleaned in watching a team of honest athletes made look so nakedly vulnerable and nothing about Sligo's approach to this match suggested it would happen. A solid league and a character moulding win over Mayo. Yesterday had no sense to it.
"I said earlier that you can do all the fitness and ball work and diet in the world," sighs Moran. "But how do you get inside the lads heads after they cross the white line? That was not a true reflection of the squad. We just lost confidence and that was it. No excuses. We were annihilated. And it hurts. It hurts a lot."
Delighted though John O'Mahony was to steer Galway to another Connacht final, he took no delight in witnessing Sligo's pain. In his dressing-room, he is low key, as if out of respect. "Look, Sligo's day has to come. I was worried coming up here because I saw in them the kind of roll that Leitrim were on in 1994," says O'Mahony.
"It didn't happen for them today but, oftentimes, that breakthrough can arrive when you least expect it. They didn't do themselves justice today but that happens. I suppose there was a lot of pressure on them in a sense."
But surely he will have to bask in this at some stage. 22 points? Exhibition stuff. "I said coming here that I'd be thrilled with any sort of win. Of course, I didn't expect this, absolutely not. It was a good performance, some of the newer lads did very well and I thought our defence were very strong early in the game.
"I was pleased that we had the strength and depth - people maybe forget that we went out against Mayo last year with a number of new lads and I think that perhaps stood to us here."
Strange too that after a turbulent few weeks for Galway that it should all go so smooth. "Well, we have had problems and I'm glad now that people know our injury worries were genuine, that we weren't trying to pull wool over eyes or anything."
