Cahair O’Kane: The kind of joy that is just indescribable

MICHAEL Murphy stands on the 13-metre line, tossing the ball back into his own hands. Nothing left now only hit it as hard as he can.

The wall of red on the goal-line stops the ball. It falls back for Ryan McHugh, on his left foot. Derry men fall over each other to get blocking it. The loose ball is scrambled away out the back and up the sideline in front of the Gerry Arthurs Stand.

Every so often, the video of that moment pops up on my timeline.

Derry hadn’t won Ulster for 24 years. And in that one minute, every bit of the angst and tension and fear and joy are audible.

Megan Doherty relishing trip into the unknown with Down

St Malachy’s, Castlewellan get the goals to claim Reihill honours

What’s most inescapable is the squealing delight in the background of Eoin McNicholl, whose voice in those few seconds is embedded in my skull.

The Ulster GAA employee is a former Derry goalkeeper. He was there that day on official duty, laptop in hand, sat in the overflow press area at the back of the main stand.

His beseeching of the referee to blow time was not a normal human noise. If he tried to replicate it, he couldn’t.

When the final whistle went, he clambered over benches and seats and bodies to get to the pitch as fast as he could. Neutrality is the least GAA thing of all things.

That was the day I started filming the final few moments of games. Just in case.

When I took my phone out to do the same on Sunday, I couldn’t see a thing.

The video barely even captures Ethan Doherty’s goal.

But beneath us, packed in organised fashion into the main stand in Páirc Esler were a few thousand inhabitants of Maghera that had cause to just let it all out.

When the fourth estate thrusts a microphone in a player or manager’s face and asks them to describe these moments, they all fail, just as we do ourselves.

There is no word in the English language that can do justice.

Sure, you can pick one and throw it around. Elation, euphoria, ecstasy. But none of them feel like they’re enough. All a bit underwhelming, missing a connection to the feeling itself.

When the big occasion is combined with the tension of a tight finish, the reward is an indescribable sensation.

Everyone decked out in green and gold has their own story to tell.

Roisin Lagan, sat right down the front, a stalwart in her own right whose late brother Francis left such an indelible mark on club and community. Fate had no right to take him away, least of all the cruel way it did when a tree fell on his car in 2021, but it feels like every time Glen win, his spirit is there in the ground.

Others that have loved and lost, the happiness of the last three years perhaps carrying them one Sunday at a time into a new normality.

And there’s Meadhbh McCullagh in the middle of it, with her boys Paddy and Thomas, her daughter Katie.

Meadhbh is my wife’s cousin. Her husband, Mickey, is part of the Glen management team.

He was an under-rated corner-forward in barren times long forgotten now.

The mild, speak-when-spoken-to nature of his fellow schoolteacher appealed to Malachy O’Rourke when he was building a management team.

Meadhbh is there, dancing with delight, just as unable to describe the feeling as any of the rest of us.

It’s different for everyone. The elements are all the same but the mixture changes depending on what’s in your own soul.

Mickey McCullagh and Michael Warnock are cousins. Their siblings are last off the field, huddled together for a photo with Michael and Marty Morrissey as they head off to do an interview.

In front of the TG4 cameras moments earlier, there’s emotion in Warnock’s voice as he thinks of all they’ve put themselves through in the last year to get back to this point.

It’s his birthday and he’s just won the TV crowd’s man of the match after getting the better of Shane Walsh for the second year running. His feeling is different and the same.

Is it a more heightened feeling altogether at that very top end, as if the greater helping of sacrifice to reach All-Ireland finals electrifies the senses further?

Maybe it’s not at all.

I was up home on Friday evening for the wake of Patsy Burke, known to everyone in Drum as Tur.

Tur had the spirit of a 16-year-old. His eyes were eternally wide with mischief that his trademark moustache could disguise.

The house and his coffin were covered in photographs. 6x4s, 8x5s, those perfectly square sepia-tinged ones. Family, football, farming.

Right at the back door, a photo of him and Oul Duck [Donal Brolly] and Alex Moore, sat out the back of the house at a picnic table during Covid, trying to replace their evenings in the Dolphin.

Tur, Duck and Alex came as a package deal.

Duck passed away on January 3, 2023.

Patsy passed away on January 3, 2024.

His daughter Leona had bought him a new Drum club coat for Christmas. He wore it to his rest, the number 4 that he always wore draped over him, more photos at his feet.

At the door of the room, a table of objects that depicted his life. Among them, the team photo from 1982 in which he stands unmistakably second from the right in the back row.

He won four junior championship medals, the first and last of them 21 years apart.

Is his joy at those any less?

Patsy also played in two intermediate finals that Drum lost, the first of them in 1983. The opponents that day? Glen, and a young Enda Gormley who beat them almost all on his own.

Beneath in the stand at Páirc Esler two days later, Gormley is in the thick of it at his indescribable peak of his happiness, surrounded by thousands all lost in their own worlds for those few seconds.

His feeling is surely laced with the satisfaction of the hand he’s played in making all this happen, through his work with the players at underage and senior level.

It’s all different and all the same.

All equally indescribable.