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They will no doubt come again, but as Mayo slipped into a dark night filled with new regrets, it didn’t feel good to ask.
here are two aspects parallel to them as footballers. The first is that wrinkled, grumpy face they manage to find for Dublin in battle. The second? That calm and respectful grace – almost from the cemetery – with which they face their destiny.
Long after the large squat cup had been delivered, Lee Keegan (his rib cage nearly powdered some time ago from a dangerous challenge from Mick Fitzsimons) was out on the field, arms folded, chatting with Philly McMahon.
It’s like Mayo has a kind of deep understanding of her place in this relationship. As the world grows smaller around Dublin, Mayo simply puts her hopes in a winter drawer and tells herself that this terrible, moldy story of heartbreak is nearing its end.
What is the alternative? Rage against the light?
It is true that James Horan did not dare to take a single step in Dessie Farrell’s direction when he finished. And there was a moment later, when he was taken to Hogan’s rostrum for his postgame press conference before Farrell completed his, you felt smoke of anger behind eager eyes.
As he climbed those steps, he ran into Jonny Cooper on his way down. The Dublin defender instinctively touched him with a respectful hand, but all Horan dared to summon was a barely perceptible nod.
He’s grown weary, as one might deduce, of the idea that Mayo is somehow designed for this.
His team left every fiber, every cuticle in that field and yet for the last 10 minutes or so, Dublin returned home with the ease of a pleasure vaporizer. Now we are just stenographers in your world, tasked with transcribing the little detail of quirky numbers.
They are an imperious and undramatic team built to work logically and smoothly these days.
True, no one shakes Dublin physically like Mayo, but where is the consolation of that after eight years without winning a league or championship against the city team? So just take some photos and put them on plastic like the others.
This is a story that does not change.
Horan’s deep voice was familiarly low as he spoke to reporters. You could tell he longed to be home and quiet and escape the almost loud shouts of a team celebrating nearby in front of an empty hill.
Mayo had been alive in the last quarter, something repeated over and over again as if that, in itself, had historical status.
“We were in a strong position,” Horan said, barbed wire on his tongue.
He knew, and we knew, that this was not necessarily the case. Because you can be close to this Dublin team and still seem isolated from the last peninsula of hope.
Aidan O’Shea was especially encouraged during the last water break, with Mayo trailing by just one point. But its noise seemed more theatrical than anything anchored in hope. Because Mayo hadn’t thrown a recognizable punch while Robbie McDaid was on the stand, and now they were chasing energy that you felt was just not there.
The last quarter was consequently monotonous and merciless.
In the end, Mayo began chasing after a goal when they needed two, tossing O’Shea on the edge of the Hill-end ‘square’ as a kind of scratch-off solution to empty pockets. It felt symbolic. Futile.
And so the digits turned again for Dublin. The best team we’ve seen? Unquestionably. The most exciting? They have not needed to be.
Think of Saturday night in one context. Think of it in the context of the May story, of all those little tragic stories compressed into the 69 years since they last won and our appetite for nostalgia in their company, our taste for images of liver-stained hands holding medals. ancient as saints. artifacts.
Think of Saturday night in the context of all the lost finals since ’51 and those little pockets of what sometimes seemed like self-sabotage.
Think about that and think of an open team for a goal in 13 seconds. Isn’t pain like art?
There are so many hauntingly beautiful passages stitched through Keith Duggan’s magnificent 2007 book House of Pain – Through the Rooms of Mayo Football, that it seems hardly believable that the same story continues to be scrawled throughout their lives nearly a decade and a half later. .
Duggan wrote it after a second final drilling across Ireland from Kerry in three years. A drill after which Kerry coach Jack O’Connor told Mayo’s locker room that the need for his team “had been greater.”
That Monday night, Mayo’s team came home in the rain to a large and generous crowd outside The Welcome Inn in Castlebar. A crowd that, as David Brady said, represented “strangers standing in the pouring rain to greet a team that had been destroyed in the most important soccer game of the year.”
Somehow, the grace of that meeting was reproduced in that of Horan’s men, who stood as sentinels during the strange Saturday night formalities in an empty stadium.
Mayo may be too familiar with pain to make it bitter. You really don’t know better soccer men in life than John O’Mahony or John Maughan and you’d have a hard time thinking of more graceful and charismatic lost heroes than John Morley or Liam Duffy or Ted Webb.
He can’t help but wonder what god Webb would have become if he had reached that railroad crossing seconds earlier or later in February ’76. Or star Ger Geraghty, a man Kevin McStay considered the best he had lined up alongside, He might have been in green and red if he hadn’t met a girl (his future wife) in Chicago.
Pain
The easy thing is to trace something almost lyrical in your pain. Something predestined.
And Horan, it can be said now, despises that reflection. Perhaps his great misfortune is that his time in office coincides with that of modern Dublin.
Or maybe this is another story embroidered with little self-harm narratives. He stood, arms crossed as Saturday’s game slipped away, Mayo palpably beyond rescue.
They had returned to being habitually heroic without even threatening a goal against a team that thus closed this strangest season without conceding one.
And for all those who see a prototype made almost deliberately here in Dublin, a kit that reflects hapless inequality, the clinical conclusion of the season simply fueled that corny tone.
“We were still in this with 12 or 13 minutes to go, but maybe we ran out of juice a little bit,” Horan said. “Going into the last quarter, we were looking for a strong position.”
Mathematically, that was also true. But spiritually? For those of us who sat atop the great, cavernous church, the realization was already traveling that this was an old story that sank into the night with little intention of letting go.
May ran near Dublin and the sun rose again this morning. Life as we know it.
They will return. They always do it.
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