When it was over and the sea of humanity began to swallow up the Donegal players and staff, Jim McGuinness found a way to escape it all.
He jogged over towards the Gerry Arthurs stand, evading all the wellwishers, backslappers and moving selfie-hunters, eventually squeezing out through a gate. As the whole of Donegal was streaming on to the pitch, McGuinness was heading the other way.
He climbed into the seats in search of his mother Maureen. When he got there, he held her in a hug, emptying all the good of the day into the moment.
“She hasn’t had many days out lately,” he said. She, as well as the rest of Donegal.
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McGuinness’s side won their Ulster title the hard way. They beat Derry, who were everybody’s consensus pick as the best team in the province. They beat Tyrone after extra-time. They beat Armagh here, after a 0-20 to 0-20 game that went to extra-time and penalties. They don’t come more gruesomely-earned than that.
Nor do they come from more unlikely beginnings. This time last year, Donegal were lost and wandering. They were knocked out of Ulster by Down. They raised a small gallop in the All-Ireland series but exited meekly to Tyrone in front of their own supporters in Ballybofey. A day like this would have felt oceans away.
It was the Donegal players themselves who hooked McGuinness and brought him back. Standing in the chaos of the Clones tunnel, amid the noise and ferment of Donegal’s 11th title swirling all around, he tried to wrap words around how it came about and what it all meant.
“They arrived at the door the day after they got beat by Tyrone and they never really stopped after that,” McGuinness said of his players. “Two days after that, there was a letter in the post box. It went from there, they never left me alone.
“And that constantly pulls at you emotionally because you are sitting in the house going, ‘Could you make a difference?’ I’m not actively working at the minute so you have that scenario running in your head. Eventually Paddy McBrearty broke me!”
Emotion. That’s what an Ulster final is about really. For the third year in a row, it went to extra-time. For the second in a row it went to penalties.
In front of a full house of 28,896, the afternoon ran the spectrum from factor-50 sunshine to a full-on thunderstorm that sent hundreds out the gate at half-time looking for the drying solace of the local pubs.
In the end, Shaun Patton dived right to save Shane Partlan’s sudden-death penalty and the dam burst. We asked McGuinness afterwards how big a factor emotion is in all of this.
“It’s massive. That’s the whole thing. The whole thing about inter-county football, place and identity. Where you come from, who you represent. They are out there today, very fortunate to be the 15 and the 26 that are representing. They’re the fortunate ones.
“And we were trying to impose that on them last night. We were watching the hurling in the team room and it was amazing. Amazing. It was a brilliant way to set us up for the weekend, fellas leaving it all out there. We just left it all out there.
“You have to believe. If you don’t see yourself in the depths of winter here on Ulster final day in Clones then there’s no point being back. You had to believe that. The challenge is so multifaceted. There’s culture and fitness and everything else. They turn up every night and they give it everything. It wasn’t perfect. We have a lot of things to tweak but they turned up and gave it everything. And that’s all we can ask for.”
For Armagh, it’s another heartbreak. This is their fourth penalty shoot-out and their fourth defeat. They will have regrets about not killing the game off when they were on top – and not being braver when the game was there to be won.
Twice near the end of normal time, they took marks inside the Donegal 45, only to turn around and kick them backwards. Whatever about the vicissitudes of penalties, they’re making a bad habit of not winning games they look to have the winning of.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a pattern,” said Kieran McGeeney afterwards. “We’re a team that comes from behind and we’ve done that on more than one occasion, and today the turning point was probably Oisín Conaty being through and their man got half a block on it and it just dropped into the keeper’s hands, and that would have put us five up. But Donegal are a good team as everyone is pointing out, and you just have to give them credit, that’s it.”
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