ON the first day of February 2008, Darren McAnenly was driving on the A5 between Omagh and Ballygawley when his car collided with another vehicle.
Darren was 19. He tragically lost his life in the accident.
Eight months later, members of his family were brought downstairs in Croke Park allowed into the sanctuary of the Tyrone dressing room that had just welcomed back the Sam Maguire Cup.
John Devine had been due to start the game in goal for Tyrone but lost his father on the eve of the final.
When the trophy had been transported safely back across the border, it arrived at the Devine household during John snr’s wake.
The morning after the game, Tyrone’s players had taken the trophy for its annual trip to Crumlin Children’s Hospital.
Six-year-old Turlough Conefrey was suffering from leukaemia. He was a Tyrone supporter. Brian Dooher and Mickey Harte helped him lift Sam Maguire above his head.
A couple of months later, the cup went back to Turlough, this time at school in Drumnamore. His friends and teachers roared with approval as he lifted the silverware again
The following February, Turlough lost his battle.
“I visited the wake and remembered the happy days the cup helped inspire in his last few months. That was the power of Sam,” Harte would recount in his second book, ‘Presence Is The Only Thing’.
Tyrone are no strangers to tragedy.
Mickey’s own daughter Michaela, Cormac McAnallen, Paul McGirr, Paul Hughes, they are inextricably linked to the devastation their deaths brought down upon a county, indeed a country.
But they’re linked too to success. To that era when Tyrone football stuck out its chest and, in the years they escaped the headlocks they exchanged with Armagh, bullied Kerry around the place.
Tyrone sought not to make their successes crusades, because playing football on pure emotion is a disorienting business.
Instead, they kept it inwards until they won and then they allowed it out.
Those are the names we all remember, whose impact on the lives of the men who brought Sam Maguire north are as embedded in Tyrone’s history as the successes themselves.
It’s the McAnenly family and the Devines and the Conefreys and hundreds upon hundreds like them who get to reach out and touch joy at times when it seems impossible to find.
When Limerick won the All-Ireland hurling title in the mouth of last Christmas, Cian Lynch spoke of how the victory had given his family the “great sense of joy and a distraction from the reality of things”.
Lynch’s uncle Paul Carey, a brother of the legendary Ciaran, had died in a car accident in Dubai a month previously.
“We have to enjoy every moment we have here because no-one knows what’s around the corner. That just epitomises it,” said Lynch.
When players are striving to win an All-Ireland medal, they’re essentially doing it for selfish reasons.
But if they can achieve it, they find that their joy gets to be shared in multiples by every disciple that follows them.
The starving January nights when you can hardly see the ball through your own breath blinding you on a field that feels ploughed more than cut are hard to correlate to those moments of intense joy felt by thousands of others nine months later.
Victory gives birth to a county’s wildest dreams.
Thirteen years on from their last success, Tyrone people are mad for a taste out of the bottle again.
Mayo have been involuntarily teetotal in their pursuit of what would be the sweetest devil’s milk ever drunk.
No county has tossed and turned over Sam’s absence the way Mayo have.
While their history includes All-Irelands, it’s only better to have loved and lost if you don’t find yourself doing the losing over and over again.
They’re the one county whose journey over the last 70 years has been so close to that winning feeling that there are times you would forget it’s a forgery.
To come so close so many times has them endlessly heartbroken.
Their footballing story is often labelled as a tragedy.
Mayo’s real-life tragedies haven’t been afforded those joyous moments in which they’re forgotten and remembered all at once.
It would be great for Mayo people to think the families of Darragh Walsh, of Raphael Sunday, of Darragh Sloyan, of Garda Colm Horkan, or the many others whose lives were intertwined in the GAA but have been lost, might get to experience those moments this weekend.
That they might visited by Sam Maguire at some point in the coming months, and that the tears trip down into a smile on faces that sum up a truly special emotional connection.
That’s the power of Sam.
