‘A wee small rural village’ - Kilcoo scale the unlikeliest of mountains

The fact that Kilcoo have been coming doesn’t make it any more explicable that they have arrived. A village of 300 people in rural Down, a team made up of brothers and cousins and not a whole pile more. All-Ireland champions? Wild.

"It's absolutely amazing," said defender Aaron Branagan on Saturday night. "It's absolutely mad. I run the gym and people in Kilcoo are completely unwise, I am not joking you. They talk more about the football to me. Saying things like, 'I am not going to go to class this week, just too nervous'. Grown men telling you they hadn't had their dinner in a few nights through nerves.

"That's just Kilcoo, couldn't have gone anywhere but somebody wasn't mentioning it to you. It's not like us 15 lads, the whole village is the exact same. There are some men there like Pat Joe Travers, I know they got him into an Executive Box there and he was on oxygen all week. Like, for the likes of that man to see where we have come from.

“What’s amazing about the whole thing is, in Kilcoo if you don’t play football you are a stranger in the village. I think it is brilliant. I stopped drinking a while back, because I had a goal. It can give you great purpose. It keeps you on the straight and narrow, stops boys going away to Dubai to teach or England for work.

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“For a wee small rural village you put your heart and soul into it and I think for the next generation it gives them encouragement. I have a wee boy, most of the boys have wee boys, I don’t know what way it’s working, but they are all boys. This can maybe breed this on right through!

“When it went to extra-time, I know we came very close to being beat but we trained so hard. Mickey [Moran] has taken our training to another level. Every night you go to training, you know you are having no dinner tonight. Eat afterwards because you know you are so well trained.

“But I find there is a psychological element to that because you know there is nobody worked any harder and that plays in your head. We said that in the huddle, extra time, it is what we do, it’s our time. Our training, we always finish with really hard running and knowing that there is always that wee bit left in the tank.”