Only two county senior championships still to be completed and then that’ll be it for another year

Niall McIntyre

We had it good.

There two Sundays ago, there was 15 county senior finals going on at the one time.

Club’s Twitter pages like Tourlestrane’s and Kilcoo’s were being refreshed frantically by people who’d never even dreamed of setting foot in those places in their lives. They were GAA people though, and the GAA is one of those things that makes Ireland a much smaller place.

Christ, if you asked a handful of Irish who weren’t from county Leitrim about Aughawillan before October 15, half of them wouldn’t have had a clue what you were on about, never mind the fact that they’re now the best Gaelic football club in Leitrim.

But when that little club with the big dreams went out and beat Mohill against all the odds in the Leitrim county final, you better believe Aughawillan made itself a little bigger on the map.

Its Aughawillan that are champions as they beat Mohill 0-14 to 1-9 pic.twitter.com/oienCF8QKk

— Alan Gunn (@AlanGunn2429) October 14, 2018

We saw the celebrations from Leitrim, we saw celebrations from Roscommon, we saw them in Meath, we saw them in Wicklow we even saw them in London and we were either jealous or we were liars watching them.

County champions. This is what that looks like.

We’d have loved for that to be our club and if you’re still playing you were probably inspired to go out to the back garden and kick a football around the place or pick up a hurl and puck a few balls off the wall because the way a run in the county championship brings a whole community closer together is the way every community wants to be.

Now Aughawillan are into the Connacht senior football semi-finals. They’ll be playing either Ballintubber, known all over Ireland as a football stronghold or they’ll be playing against Tourlestrane – only known outside of Sligo because they’ve become the kings of football in the county over the last while.

That’s the power of the GAA for you. That’s the power of the county championship.

You only know a great thing when it’s gone and as our search bar on Twitter turned from Armagh GAA to Wicklow GAA to Cork GAA one after another, that was a brilliant thing.

The cream rises to the top in the county and then they go into the bonus territory of the provincial championships and play against the best that the rest has to offer. Representing their county.

Now, the cream has risen to the top in every county, except for county Galway. The westerners are the only county still to complete their hurling and football championships. The reason their hurling championship is the last one to finish every year is because there is no Connacht senior hurling championship – the Galway winners go straight through to the semis.

The football is only still going because Mountbellew-Moylough forced a replay nobody would have predicted when they almost defeated Corofin last weekend.

That should be a good one this Sunday.