The agony and the ecstacy

HE ICONIC MEMORY of the Dublin v Kerry 2011 All-Ireland final that will stay with me will not be Stephen Cluxton’s free floating into a seat of blue. Nor even Kevin McMenamon’s eerie recreation of a certain goal in 1977 also involving a Brogan.
Oh, don’t get me wrong! I will never tire of watching that. And even repeated viewings of the game have failed to stop the incredible rush of the last eight minutes.
But the memory that will stay foremost I think is the photograph of Tomás Ó Sé handing the ball to Cluxton just after the final whistle.
It was a remarkable gesture given what Ó Sé must have been feeling in the pit of his stomach, and considering that many of his team mates were lying prostrate with grief on the grass.
I suspect that it is an image that will long outlive the day and that it will perhaps one day come to define what football means and what Dublin and Kerry mean in the same way that the Wexford players carrying Christy Ring on their shoulders in 1956 in many ways encapsulates the spirit of hurling.
It was just an incredible match and an incredible place to be. Never have I experienced anything like the last ten minutes, nor do I expect ever to be lucky enough ever again to witness such a spectacle.
On a day when the match was played at such a level of intensity amid an elemental roar, the decibel level and my blood pressure and hyper-ventilation still climbed to new levels for the denouement.
Someone said to me afterwards that if you submitted a script outlining such an end for a fictional match it would rejected as too fantastic. It was Roy of the Rovers stuff. The sort of way you fantasised as a child about how matches would be won.
The only All-Ireland football final in my memory that is comparable is the 1982 Kerry v Offaly game when Seamus Darby came on and scored the winning goal to deny The Kingdom the five-in-a-row.
But that match never looked as lost to Offaly as did the Dubs’ game against Kerry. As the clock crept relentlessly past the hour, I was just beginning to accept that Dublin were not going to win. I could not conceive of how they might have pulled it out of the fire.
And yet they did. Quite how they managed it, I am still not sure.
There is a thin line between agony and ectasy. Dublin looked fate in the eye and decided not to accept it. Kerry slipped from the latter into the former in a batting of an eye.

ad there been longer left on the clock, the game might well have turned again. But the sands of time had all but run out and Dublin just happened to have their noses in front at the death. There was literally a kick of a ball in it.
People sometimes remark of Kerry that they have won so many that losing the odd one does not really hurt. It does. And it showed. They shall be back, of course. Indeed, they rarely wander too far other than that incredible gap between the end of the three-in-a-row in 1986 and winning it in 1997.
Dublin have regular such famines although the recent one was threatening to surpass previous barren spells. There were also 16 years between the 1942 and 1958 titles; and 19 years before that back to 1923. Hopefully, there will be no more of that, although days like this almost make it worth the wait.
But if this Dublin team never do anything else, they have earned their place in history. Not so much for breaking the long losing run, nor even being one of those rare Dublin sides to beat Kerry.
What they will remembered for most of all is the manner of the win, and those mad, incredible, last eight minutes when the world seemed turned on its head.
Sometimes sport produces moments of unparalleled magic and suspense. This was one such and for once the boys in blue jerseys were on the right side of it.