CIARA Mageean was only starting out in athletics when she took part in the Irish U15 championships in Tullamore.
Joanna Mills, an accomplished young hopeful, was the favourite to beat her.
Both runners were coached by Eamonn Christie.
He knew before it began that the last 300 metres would determine the outcome.
“The two of them went off and they got the instructions to get to the front, work hard and with 300 metres to go, whoever wants it the most will get it,” Christie told The42.ie in a piece from 2020.
Mageean won the race by a distance.
When it came to the last 300 metres in Sunday night’s European 1500m final, Jemma Reekie and Georgia Bell never stood a chance.
Their Great Britain garb might as well have been pulled from a bag of Ballycran jerseys.
There’s a point as they’re coming around the last bend that you can see Mageean’s face solving the puzzle.
Can’t go around them.
Can’t get to the inside.
The only way here is straight through.
As a midfielder with Portaferry camogs, Mageean’s direct and fearless running at the heart of opposition defences was what made her so difficult to stop.
If there was any hint of a gap at all, she would find a way through it.
Her words to RTE in the immediate aftermath of winning European gold in the 1500m were instantly immortalised.
“I didn’t grow up playing camogie to get boxed in.”
Speaking yesterday, her mother Catherine said that when Ciara decided to go through the gap, it was “as if she was going for goal with a hurl and a ball.”
Although it’s widely established that Mageean gave up the sport at the end of her minor career, that’s not quite the full story.
She made her senior debut at 14.
That was not uncommon until it was outlawed in more recent times, but Mageean did play several years of senior camogie.
Like many addicts, she fell off the wagon several times.
She’d come down home from Belfast for the weekend and her friends would plague her to tog out and sit on the bench, just to scare the opposition.
But that was too close to the action. She knew before she ever set foot inside the gates that she’d end up playing.
Eventually, though, it had to give.
Elizabeth Collins was Mageean’s coach for almost the entire time she played camogie.
When the running started to feature more heavily in Ciara’s teenage years, the whole trajectory of her life could have been so radically altered under a different coach.
If Elizabeth Collins had resisted her notions of athletics, told her she was wasting her time, sure what will you ever achieve there, stay here and we’ll win Down championships with you leading the way, Ciara Mageean would have done it in a heartbeat.
Her mindset at that time was very much camogie first, athletics second.
Instead, Portaferry and Collins did her an act of service. They’d take her off in games, put her in nets other days, just to prevent her from breaking.
Equally, her athletics coach Eamonn Christie never resisted camogie either.
He saw not only the social benefits of a team sport but the physical advantages of the shorter, sharper running.
Ciara Mageean could have been one of the all-time great camogs for Portaferry and Down if she’d kept at it.
But that would have meant that Ireland never got to fall in love with one of its greatest daughters or that the rest of the world never have known her.
Imagine how great a travesty that would have been.
By the time she came to make a decision after captaining her club to a minor championship in 2010, she was ready to make the right one.
It was clear by then.
A few months earlier, she had gone to the World Junior Championships in Canada.
Of the 24 medals in track and field, 23 were won by runners from African nations.
Ciara Mageean won the other, a silver medal in the 1500m.
It was Ireland’s first ever medal on the track at the World Juniors.
She ran 4:09.51, shaving six seconds off her own Irish record.
Now, she is the best in Europe. Collectively, an entire nation hopes that she can get through the next few weeks without getting injured.
In Tokyo three years ago, she carried a calf injury into the heats.
As the final lap began and legs stretched, she couldn’t stay with them, falling away to finish tenth.
Part of what attracted her to choose athletics was that she was in control of her own destiny.
In camogie, her success would have been utterly reliant on 14 others.
But as a 1500-metre specialist, triumph lives and dies with her alone.
The night before the final at a previous European Championships, she sat in a hotel lobby in tears, unsure of herself.
She has long subscribed to Professor Steve Peters’ theory of The Chimp Paradox.
It revolves around the chimp being the part of your brain that thinks emotionally.
Everyone has a chimp, and they’re all different.
You cannot get rid of yours, so you have to learn how to live with it.
The tears of that night have been replaced by steely confidence that has been built through running faster times with stronger finishes and winning medals.
300 metres from home in Rome on Sunday night, her chimp was surely only reinforcing ‘you have this’.
Ciara Mageean’s name will already go down in Irish sporting history, regardless of what happens in Paris.
It would have been a sin for camogie to resist handing over someone of that calibre.
Every sporting organisation wants the best players, the best athletes, the best people to be theirs.
Particularly when it comes to the club game, you cling on to those players for dear life.
They are the cornerstone on which successful teams are built.
But Ciara Mageean’s feathers were just too bright.
Sometimes you just have to let them go and be content that you played your part in creating them.
Camogie let her go but it too should benefit because for young girls, every sporting idol they can muster is another step into a better future.
She is no less ours than she ever was.
Still the girl from Portaferry who carries her hurl and sliotar around the world with her, hoping to sneak a few moments to puck off a wall.
Portaferry and camogie are still who she is, and will be until her dying day.
The way in which she carries herself, the unabashed retention of the Strangford Lough accent, the references to home and family and all the things that built her up to be a European champion, it stirs something inside when you listen to her speak.
She’s as proud of it as it is of her.
As we all are of her.