MICHAEL McKeefry could not sleep on Thursday night.
Tossing and turning, he began to drive the roads of Maghera in his mind, stopping at every field he played football in as boy and man.
Walsh’s Field. Gorry’s Park. The Mill Field.
“I think I stopped counting at 10 that we’d had in my time.”
Michael is 87 going on 19.
His grandson, Connor Carville, is Glen’s captain.
Whatever Sunday brings in Croke Park, he wishes it would hurry up and arrive. He’ll meet two of his sons, Benny and Martin, in Belfast early doors, head down with them.
It’s some life he’s lived. Michael has worked his whole life in Maghera, first in Eastwood’s shoe shop, part of the dynasty owned by Tommy Joe Eastwood, a brother of the famous Barney.
When Eastwood died and the shops were sold off, McKeefry opened a furniture store. He’s still in there most days.
The Germans dropping flares as they passed over Maghera having blitzed Belfast when he was just five is imprinted on his mind.
There wasn’t much football played during World War II but when there was, he was one of 60-odd people squashed on to the Ulster Transport Bus, heading off as part of the entourage with Sean Larkin’s, one of the precursors to the club we now know as Glen.
The GAA was built on these men.
Three years ago, St Brigid’s lost Jimmy Mannion. He played and won. He coached – ‘both feet, both hands’ was his mantra - and won. He administrated. Administrators never win.
Mannion was vice-president of the club when he died. He had driven the building of their clubhouse and the development of their facilities at Páirc Naomh Bríd.
It’s 11 years since St Brigid’s won their All-Ireland, with his son Shane on the team.
Everyone in Croke Park this weekend will have their own story. For some, it’s a day out and a bag of cans. Others, a lifetime’s work.
McKeefry guided Glen to purchase the land for a new pitch in 1970. They paid £300-an-acre for a ten-acre plot. When they looked about expansion a few years ago, it cost them £26,000-an-acre for about three-and-a-half more.
In the GAA, there is barely universal agreement on what colour the sky is so why would that project have been any different?
On the back entrance to Watty Graham Park, away from the main A6 road, still stands the remnants of an old scutch mill.
Maghera was big flax country at the time. Part of the deal was that they left the mill.
This is where the two layers of a stalk of flax would be separated. The rough, woody part would be pulled away to reveal the flax fibre, which was then cleaned using a flat wooden scutching knife.
On the other side of the ground, a thread of the Moyola river.
“When we bought that particular field, everybody said it would never be a football pitch,” recalls McKeefry.
“We had a good bit of trouble getting the pitch right, two or three different goes at it.
“This man said you should put a drain here and this man said you should put a drain there.
“I just agreed with everybody and then did my own thing,” he says, laughing, before he demurs: “I did a good bit at that time but a lot of people did a lot more than me and didn’t get the same publicity out of it.
One of his favourites things to say in meetings was ‘you could be right there’.
“That implied they could also be wrong but I didn’t say that,” he chuckles down the phone.
Shortly after, they purchased a bakery warehouse on the other side of the town.
Towns change. It had been the site where every day, the bread vans would roll in and out with their daily deliveries.
Most people had bread delivered every day. More awkward, out-of-the-way families maybe got three in the week. There were no deliveries at the weekend so people had to stock up.
“There was one particular family got 16 loaves at the weekend to keep them going. The loaves came in fours, they were baked in such a way that there were four loaves in each batch, they called that four tickets of loaves, was 16 loaves.”
Buying that site, as much as the pitch, would become central to their success.
Long before Slaughtneil disco became a thing, Glen were thinking outside the box themselves.
Dances were forbidden on GAA territory under the rules at the time. So a brilliant local lady called Betty Noone formed Fairhill Youth Club, a kind of a front for the GAA club. Under its name, huge marquees were erected out behind John O’Doherty’s garage that hosted fancy dress balls and dancing carnivals.
With the money they made, they redeveloped the old bakery and opened the social club in 1976.
Licensing laws in the north offered held out an opportunity that they grasped.
“Only hotels and social clubs could open on a Sunday evening so people had nowhere else to go for a bit of entertainment only to a hotel for a bit of a social drink or the club for a drink and a bit of a dance.
“When we initially started, ‘English’ dancing wasn’t all that much thought of from the GAA people, it had to be ceilis or people thought we should have been running them. Some people would have called us West Brits.
“We were maybe getting 500 or 600 people in the hall on a Sunday night. Admission was free. The bar made the money. With the profit on the drinks…”
That carried on for almost a decade until the laws were changed. But right up until recent years, they continued to avail of the law that barred pubs and nightclubs from opening on Christmas night.
Glen club was like an annual cattlemarket on December 25.
“It was a monster night. There used to be thousands inside, outside, everywhere. We had a monopoly.”
The licensing laws evolved, the showband era slipped past and the Sunday nights in Glen died a natural death, but they’d left enough behind them to propel the club on to a new plain.
In 1987, they were one of the first clubs to bring in an outside manager.
Belfast man Charlie Sweeney had been alongside Eamonn Coleman when they took Jordanstown to back-to-back Sigerson Cups in 1986 and ‘87, teams that included Enda Gormley, Barry Young and Conor Glass’s father Cathal.
Glen appointed Sweeney and he was in charge of the team that won Division One and the Larkin Cup that year.
Thirty-three years later, they put a call in to Malachy O’Rourke.
Now, they can’t sleep at night and they dream when they’re awake.