To Jack Coyne fell the responsibility to lead, not a team, but a people out of the wilderness, and then find words adequate to a day that will raise smiles on deathbeds.

This schoolteacher from Ballyhaunis was equal to the task, delivering a captain’s speech that stands comparison with any delivered from the steps of the Hogan Stand.

There was nothing like it, many agreed, since Joe Connolly’s address in September 1980 as captain of the Galway hurlers. Connolly, like Coyne, was a young leader; he wasn’t yet 24 when he gave his speech, almost entirely in Irish, on a seismic day for the old game.

Galway were bridging a 57-year gap to their last All-Ireland title, and Connolly found the perfect pitch with his words, remembering the legions of his people lost to emigration across the generations, understanding how deeply those exiles would feel the reverberations of victory.

Connolly got what victory meant – and Jack Coyne did, too.

His nine-minute address was spellbinding, an opinion at obvious risk of contamination from the prejudices of this listener, a Mayo native.

Checks with colleagues in the Croke Park press box on Sunday evening confirmed the impression: this had been one of the all-time great acceptance speeches.

Their opinion should have guaranteed more detachment than I was capable of summoning amid floods of tears as our new age dawned, but there was hardly a person in the media seats who wasn’t emotionally shook by one of the most moving days in the history of Irish sport.

That Coyne, just 25 and representative of the gush of youth that has helped transform Mayo’s fortunes, so memorably captured the occasion does him enduring credit.

True to Mayo’s epic pursuit, there was one late twist as he went to accept the cup. He had to dash back down the steps of the Hogan Stand before receiving it from GAA president Jarlath Burns; he had forgotten his notes.

It was worth the wait. He is the man who got to raise the most famous cup in the country to the heavens, and to do it on behalf of the people of Mayo.

Those same heavens teem with the departed, those who didn’t live to see the day, but perhaps could relish it from another realm. And it was his recognition of those who went before that made his speech so memorable – and which captured the essence of a day that many of us will remember until our last breath.

He acknowledged the efforts of earlier generations of players and managers, but he got that this was about ordinary people,

the weeping masses all around him in Croke Park, but also those scattered to the winds, watching on from afar, and their children and their grandchildren.

This was a day for all of them.

‘And finally, to the people of Mayo,’ he said to riotous acclaim as his speech reached its climax, ‘this victory belongs to each and every one of you.

‘Whether you are here in Croke Park, or wherever you are across the world, today is a day for Mayo,’ he said.

This was a win achieved by the tireless graft of Coyne and his team-mates. They were the ones who spent the winter training when no one was thinking about July in Croke Park.

They are the ones who put every other aspect of their lives on hold to pursue this improbable dream. Some of them chose to forego careers outside of the county to return to Mayo, moving their lives back west to better fit with training demands.

There were no tears and no jubilant homecoming with 60,000 squeezing into McHale Park, without them.

And yet it wasn’t just their victory. Sports teams often become so obsessed with chasing their goals that they shut off the outside world, to the extent that they miss the entire point of what they’re trying to achieve.

It’s about one magnificent group of young men and their ambitions, but more profoundly it’s about the cause they serve and the history they honour by their efforts.

That, in essence, is the wonder of the GAA: its incomparable power to unite people with nothing in common, behind one immutable identity.

That’s a word now hotly contested, besieged by competing political interests, and some darker ones, too.

But the GAA allows us to identify ourselves in a pure and uplifting way with where we’re from.

This is us, we say. Here is our team. These are our colours.

‘For years,’ said Jack Coyne, ‘people have spoken about history, past experiences, pressures, and everything that comes with wearing the jersey.

‘For this group, it was about something much simpler: it was about representing this county and today, we did it with pride.’

And the result of that will resound through the ages, a source of unending pride for the people of Mayo.

It feels miraculous that, in a splintering world, there is still a cause around which people identify in such a wholesome way.

That priceless truth is animating a county that might never sleep again, and swelling the hearts of its natives wherever they roam.

No serious fan believed in 'the curse'

The curse was bunkum. I worked on the All-Ireland finals of 1996 and 1997 as a student in The Mayo News, and amid the fervour of the build-up to those games, we covered every conceivable angle and spoke to anyone tangentially connected to the Mayo team.

There was no mention of a curse, just as we heard no mention of it years earlier when the late John O’Mahony led Mayo to their first final in 38 years in 1989.

The ‘curse’ became a story in the mid-2000s, after Mayo lost the finals of 2004 and 2006 to Kerry.

But when researching Galway’s long wait between the hurling titles of 1923 and 1980 recently, I came upon a story of a priest in Castlegar cursing the Galway team when he discovered members of his congregation were leaving Mass early to attend matches.

They wouldn’t win another All-Ireland, this vengeful padre reputedly vowed, as long as there was a Castlegar man in their ranks.

This particular curse was only lifted by the visit of Paul John Paul II to the county in 1979. The story of a priest resorting to voodoo to curse a county team obviously translated from Galway hurling to Mayo football at some point, and there it stayed.

It was an irresistible angle to the story of Mayo’s epic journey from hopefuls to champions, as they allegedly defied history and the curse to win the Sam Maguire.

But yes, it was nonsense. And no, no serious fan believed it.

Dreams of a modern, energised New Ireland are gone with the wind 

A report that claims Ireland lost enough energy to power almost 700,000 homes in the first six months of this year joins the miserable testimonies to our creaking infrastructure.

The news from Wind Energy Ireland is no surprise, and becomes one more account of how one of the richest countries in the world cannot provide the basic facilities needed for a modern society.

We’ve known this a long time, long before the warning lights started to flash around the global economy, and the dangerous whims of the Donald Trump White House cast a shadow across the fundamentals of our economic model.

With tentative belt-tightening under way in the Government, the chances of us investing in addressing the deficits in energy and transport infrastructure will inevitably diminish.

Politicians aren’t inclined towards spending money on projects that only deliver years into the future, and especially when pressure is starting to come on the public finances.

There’s no chance that the money splurged in other areas, like on a rapidly expanding public sector, will be clawed back and redirected towards guaranteeing safety of energy and water supplies, for instance.

Tough-sounding politicians talk about being in the business of choices. They invariably make easy ones.