Decades of hurt, hope and loss melt away as Mayo win sweetest All-Ireland title imaginable

Nothing else feels like this. Croke Park untethered, the whole place afloat for an hour on a lake of the sweetest tears that were ever cried. The people of Mayo, raddled and belittled all their lives, looking at each other in wonder and collapsing into each other’s arms. The decades of hurt and hope and loss all melting away forever.They gave a Kerry team boasting the greatest player of the age a seven-point head start and still turned it around. They sent out a couple of teenagers to play in the forward line and watched them run all the old truths ragged and turn all the ancient voodoo inside out. Mayo 1-20, Kerry 1-17. Chisel it on the gravestones, scribble it in the sky.Never write a sentence you’ve read before, Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said. Well Oscar, Mayo are the All-Ireland champions. How’s that for a plot twist? How’s that for a fresh, new idea? They came into this All-Ireland final against Kerry unburdened by expectation, untroubled by the sort of hype that has trailed them at so many of the other stops along their Camino. Nobody gave them a chance.You wouldn’t have wasted a prayer on them. Why would you, after everything? After the ball bouncing over the bar? After the two replays? After the two own goals? After the sendings-off and the balls off the posts and all the days when all the bad things happened to Mayo teams before? What good did prayers do any of them?READ MORETurned out they didn’t need divine intervention or whispers to the heavens or any of that old ding-dong. In the end, all they needed was all any team that climbs the Hogan Steps needs most: a good team of footballers, a sprinkling of balls and chutzpah and a manager who can get a tune out of them. And then, when it’s all coming to a simmer, when the whole thing needs lifting to a higher plane of consciousness, a heaving mass of people behind them to give it meaning.Mayo's Jack Coyne celebrates with the Sam Maguire after beating Kerry. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho Mayo tested those people here, just as they have as long as they all have lived. They went 1-5 to 0-1 down after 16 minutes, with David Clifford and Seán O’Shea on wheels and nothing sticking down at the Hill 16 end. The mountain looked forbidding enough when the teams started level. We all presumed there was nothing much to see once they’d gone seven behind.But Andy Moran doesn’t do fatalism. When he was a Mayo player, part of the teams that found all those new and interesting ways to lose these things, he would be asked from time to time whether he thought he’d ever win an All-Ireland. His stock answer was always: “I think I’ll win more than one.” It wouldn’t occur to him that this might sound like nonsense. It only ever mattered that he could convince his people to believe it too.“I always thought, in Mayo, that we were a bit down on ourselves,” Moran said afterwards. “We got to an All-Ireland final against the greatest team of all time in 2017, and it was like the world ended. I was like, ‘These are the greatest players that ever played. They’re probably better than us, and we maximised ourselves and nearly got over the line’. To me that’s achievement, that’s not failure.[ ‘Mayo had more legs, more hunger’: Jack O’Connor reflects on Kerry’s energy deficitOpens in new window ]“The 25s, 26s, 27s – the Enda Hessions, Ryan O’Donoghue, Jack Coyne, Jordan Flynn age group – I had them in 2020 in the under 20s, and I saw a talent that was far beyond the talent I had. And they weren’t achieving what we achieved, so it was great just getting them a win.“David McBrien moves from Dublin – if anyone knows a construction job coming up, can we get him one? He’s had no job for six months, but he moved home to try to do this today; Enda Hession moved home, Tommy Conroy, Donnacha McHugh.“They’ve all moved home from Dublin, packed up their lives, their girlfriends involved, and that’s the sacrifice they made to be here today. So listen, had I something to do with getting them home? It’s probably bullying more than positive attitude! But it made a massive difference to us out there today when the going got tough.”Mayo manager Andy Moran and Aidan O'Shea celebrate after the match. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho On a day of such emotion, it nearly feels vulgar to talk about the football of it all. But the truth of this final is that Mayo were actually significantly the better team. They probably won’t get around to finding that out for themselves for a couple of months, but it’s the truth of it.So many of the Kerry players didn’t lay a glove on this final. The Clifford brothers did everything to keep Kerry in the game in the second half, but one by one, their totems withered as the game went on. Dylan Geaney and Gavin White were taken off. Joe O’Connor couldn’t get anything going. When O’Shea and David Clifford missed two-pointers as time ran down, you knew Mayo could see Valhalla.Down outside the dressingroom, maybe a couple of hours after the hooter had gone, Ryan O’Donoghue wrapped words around it all. During his last All-Ireland final here, he missed a penalty. He was, by a distance, the man of the match this time around, but he waved off talk of laying ghosts or any of that old juju. That’s not what this was. Not for the players anyway.“These young bucks – Kobe, Darragh [Beirne], Bob Tuohy. You know who I’m on about? They didn’t care. Like, they didn’t care. The past is nothing to do with them. And like, Andy just instilled us. Let’s have a crack. Why not us? Keep swinging. You make a mistake, who cares? Kick a wide. Who cares? Set up for the kick-out. Keep going.”They did, and it brought them to a place somewhere beyond their people’s yearning.Mayo the champions. Finally and forever.