LAST February, Ryan Dougan arrived in Bali.
It was a little over three weeks after he’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Paul Mannion for an hour in Croke Park.
The Glen full-back won the battle but a half-fit Mannion won the war. Kilmacud finished the day as champions.
A fortnight ago, Dougan won both and it was only when he departed the scene that it almost collapsed on itself for the Watties.
Seven points up, they felt his hamstring was one sprint away from tearing and withdrew him. Mannion, quiet up until then, suddenly burst into life.
They’re not dissimilar beasts. Mannion has seven All-Irelands with Dublin but twice took breaks from inter-county football. He spent most of the first spell in China and a bit in Colombia then dipped into life in Boston a few years ago.
Jack McCaffrey was famously of similar disposition, having taken big chunks out of his playing career to pursue humanitarian projects in Africa among other things.
When Glen lost to Kilmacud a year ago yesterday, Conor Glass and Ethan Doherty were back in Owenbeg playing for Derry six days later against Limerick.
Ryan Dougan was planning his latest adventure. So too were Jack Doherty and Tiarnán Flanagan.
Dougan arrived in Bali on February 16. Doherty and Emmett Bradley both joined them with their partners for a holiday. They spent time in Uluwatu, which translates as ‘Land’s End’.
The world didn’t end because Glen lost an All-Ireland final.
It doesn’t end now that they’ve won one either.
Jack Doherty moved on towards Australia and Emmett Bradley came home again.
Over the next five months, Dougan and his girlfriend Aoife spent a bit of time in Singapore, a few days in Vietnam, a couple of weeks in the Philippines and finally Thailand.
This was normal life for them.
Of the two years that Glen have reached Croke Park, Dougan has spent eleven months on the other side of the world.
Glen had lost their first Ulster semi-final to Kilcoo in December ‘21 and the pair touched down in Jakarta in early January. Days later, the country was left reeling from an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter Scale.
They moved on to Bali, where he quickly signed up for a bit of soccer with Balibar Crawlers FC, scoring a hat-trick on his first appearance. Thailand and Vietnam were taken in before they returned home in the middle of July, just as Glen were moving into championship mode.
He works in software development. His social media feed is a frenzy of him sitting coding on picnic benches around the world. It is remote working on a different plain.
Have laptop, will travel.
“I would kinda set up a base in Bali and work there, get a nice work-life ratio, cut down the hours and just work, chill out and get a good routine,” said the reluctant post-match interviewee.
“I go down to three days a week, and do four hours a day for six days. Go to the gym in the morning, lie about until 1pm, work until 5 or so or do a couple of hours here and a couple of hours there.
“It’s not too intense. I’m not about working away my life.”
They quickly found the Wanderlust Fitness Complex, where he and Aoife would do CrossFit twice a day most days.
Ryan Dougan could play county football if he wanted to. Damian McErlain had him there briefly in the Division Four days and Rory Gallagher managed to retain his services for a few months but that was it. He’s been asked back but never really considered it.
“I was up and then left, said no, that’s it this time, not for me. And no harm, other people may enjoy it, I just want a bit of a life.
“There’s bigger places than Maghera, so there is. I just want to see about a bit before I settle down and get sorted.”
Most men in his position probably wouldn’t bother much with football.
But he was one of the Beaver boys. The Bradleys and Dohertys and Mulhollands grew up right beside him.
A product of their first Ulster minor winning team in 2011, Dougan sets off every year knowing that he’ll be back in time for the real business. He hasn’t kicked a ball in league football in two years but none of it seems to affect his mastery of the square he protects.
In fact, he insists that it helps him.
“I wouldn’t miss it. No way. I’ve played intermediate – you’re not gonna not come back when you’re pushing for an All-Ireland.
“I was home mid-July, my first game was Lavey. It’s not too bad, it’s making sure you keep the injuries away. You’re not doing much running out there, mostly CrossFit.
“I got injured in the Coleraine game and was out for a bit. If I was staying at home, I’d be going into the championship injured. I did that I don’t know how many years. Probably not playing half the year is the secret.”
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DOUGAN was already gone with full intentions of coming home by the time Tiarnan Flanagan packed his bags.
He had planned long before last year’s All-Ireland campaign that it would be his last for a while. Canada was calling.
But the Kilmacud defeat changed everything. Flanagan still went but by the time he flew out of Dublin Airport in April, it was clear in his own head that it would be a shorter stay than originally intended.
Still, Glen had already played three games in this year’s Derry championship by the time he returned home at the end of August.
“I was there for three-and-a-half months,” he says.
“This is the exact reason I came home.
“After last year I didn’t intend to come home but obviously we were beat. I was going out to stay until we got beat.
“You can’t leave it like that. Even if you don’t make it again, at least you tried.
“I kinda said I was gonna come home but at the same time, I didn’t want to.
“When you’re living it out there, playing for St Mike’s, fantastic club, and enjoying every minute of it. It’s a good standard of football out there too. Toronto. I was living the high life.”
He came home and struggled with a hamstring injury. There were four substitute appearances in Derry and then against Cargin before the gap opened up for him to get a start against Naomh Conaill.
That was the Ulster semi-final. He continued wearing the number 25 for the rest of the campaign but started each of their last four games.
In the fortnight leading into their Ulster final over Kilcoo in December 2022, Flanagan underwent a procedure to widen an artery to his heart.
When Glen trained the following night, he was hardly able to get out of bed. Yet by the weekend after, he was trailing after Shealan Johnston, denying him at every turn. Then he poked home the goal in Croke Park to take them to their first final, seeing off Moycullen.
While he was in Canada, the phone would ping every so often with a message from Malachy O’Rourke.
“I got a few texts and had a few conversations, short and sweet, how are you getting on kinda thing.
“It means a lot. It shows you how much he cares. Normally you don’t get that.
“He was just checking up, how’s the football going, how are you getting on, stuff like that. It means a lot when people text you like that.
“100 per cent, it’s why he’s loved. It’s the way he approaches you, the words he uses, the way he speaks.
“It’s hard to explain, he’s just a very approachable person. If you’ve something on your mind, you can say it to him very easily, without a shadow of a doubt. It’s the words he chooses.
“A lot of people would go with the straight and narrow but he’s nearly… a softie kinda thing. But he’s not, obviously!”
It takes all sorts to make the world turn.
For every Roy Keane, with his tunnel vision and inability to understand those that don’t share it, there’s a Roger Bannister.
Famous for running the first four-minute mile, the part of the story often lost is that he quit athletics almost immediately afterwards to focus on his career as a neurologist.
He chased and cherished sporting success but it wasn’t the only thing in his make-up.
One of the biggest mistakes GAA managers make is the failure to recognise that a happy Ryan Dougan or Tiarnan Flanagan is just as valuable as a happy Conor Glass.
If there is a secret to Malachy O’Rourke’s management, it is in his ability to achieve that.
Paul McFlynn played for O’Rourke when the Loup won Ulster a little over 20 years ago, before losing an All-Ireland semi-final to the Meehans of Caltra.
It was just pre the mobile phone era, so conversations were still held on these strange devices called a landline that you kids won’t remember.
O’Rourke would ring the McFlynn household. If Paul’s wife Aideen answered, it was never ‘is Paul there?’
It was how’s school and how are you and all the rest. The names of the players’ wives and girlfriends were as familiar to O’Rourke as the names of the players themselves.
“All the girlfriends and wives loved Malachy. And then if he was taking you away on a training weekend, there wasn’t much said,” McFlynn, who now lives in Maghera, said in 2021.
O’Rourke has always recognised that a team needs its Ryan Dougan as much as it needs its Conor Glass.
“He’s the type of fella who keeps himself in great shape anyway,” said the Glen boss of Dougan when asked post-match on Sunday.
“It’s not as if he’s away partying, he says ‘I’ll be back in June and I’ll be in good shape.’ And the boys know that.
“And he has, this last couple of years when he has come back in in June he’s in good shape and away he goes.
“The Derry championship doesn’t really get going until August, September, and the boys have to have a life as well.”
It might seem obvious but not everybody sees it with that clarity.
Plenty of clubs wouldn’t retain the services of Ryan Dougan and plenty of Ryan Dougans wouldn’t bother themselves about the club.
They wouldn’t have won the All-Ireland without him. His performance on Ben O’Carroll in the second half held the whole thing together long enough for Conor Glass to have his match-winning impact.
It’s not that winning an All-Ireland means any more or less to Dougan than it does to Glass.
But Glass went down the route of professional sport having been a star at school and county minor. It’s an inescapable reality that no matter what else he might do, he will be defined by football as part of him wants to be.
Ryan Dougan, the changing room DJ, won’t be defined by football. Losing last year hurt him, winning this year was “insane” in his own words, but either way he was getting on a plane in a few weeks and going back to the normality of a life that appears anything but normal, yet we could all learn so much from.