THE light was fading as the heroes made their way back to Dunloy as champions on the Sunday night.
Flags and flares, young and old cheering home the kings of Antrim football who’d bridged a 89-year gap to the Cuchulainns’ last success in 1936.
October 12 was a day many at the club thought they’d never see and the celebrations will live long in the memory of Dunloy’s Deaghlan Smith.
“The Sunday night, coming in on the lorry was the highlight,” he says with a shake of his head.
“The fireworks seemed to be going off for 15 minutes, it was unbelievable scenes and we had great celebrations in the club.”
But that’s all done now and you can see that, with all that celebrating out of his system now, Smith is looking forward to the next chapter.
It begins in Owenbeg on Saturday evening (6pm) with the Ulster championship preliminary round after Derry’s Newbridge.
“We had a really good week there but now I can’t wait for Ulster,” says Smith.
“It’ll be a good, it’ll be a tough battle.
“We obviously know what Newbridge are coming with, they’ve won Derry there two years in-a-row, so we’re under no illusion of what we’re coming up against at the weekend.
“All we can do is put our best 15 out there and see if it’s good enough.”
This majority of this group of Dunloy footballers – many of them dual players of course – have been together from underage days and they won everything (bar the U20 title) on the way up.
“It’s the same group of players basically from U14 to now in both hurling and football,” Smith explains.
“We won the intermediate there a couple of years ago and got the senior final in our first year up and I think the help from the younger boys coming out of minor there the past two years has really kicked us on a bit.”
Antrim hurling champions five times between 2017 and 2022 and Ulster champions in 2022, Dunloy lost the county football final in 2023 but 1-8 from Seaan Elliott saw them beat Cargin to win the big ball prize this year.
With the wind firmly in their sails and plenty of experience of Ulster competition, albeit the hurling variety, in their ranks. Smith wants the season to go on and on.
The weekend before they captured the football crown, the Dunloy hurlers had lost to Loughgiel in the semi-final of the hurling championship. Gutted by the one-point defeat, the Dunloy clubmen vowed not to slip up in the football final against four in-a-row chasing favourites Cargin.
“Getting beaten in the hurling, nobody wanted to feel like that again,” says Smith.
“So we really laid down a marker that we were going to go out and try our best and just leave it all on the table for the final and come out the right side of it.
“We did and now we start again from scratch and it’ll be fun to be in Ulster. We’ve played Ulster club for hurling but this is obviously a different experience for us and we’re coming up against different teams that we’re not used to.
“We’ll be playing against boys that we’ve watched on TV so it’s a new challenge and Newbridge are obviously a top, top side.
“They’ve won Derry two years in-a-row so they’ll be coming out to put down a real marker, but so are we.
“If we can manage to stop the Derry champions in the first round, that’ll be a big statement as well.
“But we’re under no illusions that Newbridge are obviously a top class side and we’ll just have to try our best and be at our best.”
