By Kevin Egan

AS it drove out of the MacHale Park car park around 7pm last Sunday evening, the Galway team bus sounded the horn, every blast piercing through the Castlebar air and piercing the hearts and minds of Mayo supporters as it did so.

As a gesture, it was the kind of thing that could, in time, be mentioned in pre-match team talks in a Mayo dressing room. Hurling followers will remember the immense ripple effect that emanated from Nicky English’s smile at the end of the 1993 Munster Final between Tipperary and Clare, a gesture which went largely unremarked at the time.

The noisiness of the bus, and the shouts that accompanied it, struck a sharp note of contrast with the action that preceded it over the previous few hours in Castlebar however.

It wasn’t that Galway’s win won’t have hurt Mayo – quite the opposite. In fact if you sat down on Sunday morning and wanted to write a script as to what way Galway could win the game to inflict the maximum amount of psychological damage to their northern neighbours, then you could very well have come up with something along the lines of how the 2025 Connacht SFC final played out.

The first three quarters of the game were played out largely on Mayo’s terms, with the home side negating Galway’s kickout advantage and coming like a train in the third quarter to eat away at Galway’s lead, leaving them all square at 1-13 each after Connor Gleeson’s fingertip touch on Ryan O’Donoghue’s 50 metre free.

Mayo now had a strong wind at their backs, a crowd of over 27,000 supporters getting into the game, and there was no Damien Comer, no Shane Walsh and no John Maher on the field for the Tribesmen. As the now-famous piece of commentary from the Chicago SFC went last Summer, they had the lady in the bed…we’ll leave you imagine the rest, if you haven’t already heard it.

But then, when it came to the big moments that decide important championship games, Galway won them all. Matthew Tierney’s catch, Rob Finnerty’s interception of Colm Reape’s kickout, Cillian McDaid’s run, Dylan McHugh’s block, Connor Gleeson’s save, each one potential game winners, and collectively perforated by unforced Mayo errors that only served to pour more salt on the wound.

As Matthew Ruane wound up to take on the two-point chance from the terrace side of the pitch after the hooter had sounded, not one of those 27,000 souls in the ground, players and coaches included, would have expected his shot to fly between the posts. Of course there was hope from the Mayo side and fear from the Galway side, but if you asked everyone to put their life’s savings on whether it would be a score or a wide, the bookie would have been drowned by the weight of money on a wide.

Pictured: Galway’s Sean Fitzgerald closes in on Mayo’s Aidan O’Shea during the Connacht Senior Football Final at MacHale Park on Sunday. Photo: Seb Daly/Sportsfile.