A wonderful chronicle of an extraordinary sporting odyssey

If you ever wondered what winning actually meant to a community, wonder no more; just get your hands on the massive tome that traces every step of the journey that Oughterard’s intermediate footballers made – as the cover says, from Corribdale to Croke Park – at the start of this year.

Thank God that it was all done and dusted before Covid, because this All-Ireland Intermediate Football Final triumph was greeted by a wave of raw emotion that would have made social distancing as likely as post-Brexit budget surpluses.

The easiest way to describe the production is an encyclopedia that’s the size of a phone book; 395 pages of glorious colour, recounting every moment of an odyssey that began on a grey May day in Rosmuc with a 0-9 apiece draw with Clifden, right up to the homecoming celebrations after that Croke Park dismantling of Magheracloone.

All of the match reports are there as they appeared the local and national papers – including the Connacht Tribune – but it’s the photographs from behind the scenes that show just what this truly meant.

The unbridled jubilation of that homecoming is captured in all of its glory – and while this fantastic production is clearly designed for those with Oughterard blood in their veins, it is also an enthralling illustration of how heroes can come from your own street.

It also epitomizes why the GAA will forever retain a unique place in Irish hearts, because this was a squad of lads who lifted a parish, and all who claimed roots in it, in a way that only sport can.

Their near-neighbours in Moycullen went on to make their own slice of sporting history later this year, winning their first county senior football crown – but by then Covid had clamped down on the kind of unadulterated outpouring of sheer joy that had marked this January day.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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