Winning is everything.
And when you’re inside the bubble, it’s the only thing.
You haven’t trained 85 times, half of them out on wet and soggy pitches to lose. You haven’t spent your evenings going from the gym to bed while your friends went from the pub to the nightclub, to lose.
In reality, you haven’t even thought about losing, what it is or what it would mean. Losing is the devil but it doesn’t really exist in the build-up to a game.
Training hard and thinking about the game itself is what dominates your thoughts and you’d much rather be sidetracked by packing your togs and socks the night before a game anyway.
For God’s sake Tyrone’s Conor Meyler lost on Sunday just four weeks after he’d broken his leg.
A lad like Conor Meyler hadn’t thought about anything other than getting himself as fit as he humanly could be before Sunday’s big game. He wouldn’t have even had the time to.
You haven’t thought about it because you didn’t want to and then one hour and ten minutes later it just hits you out of nowhere like a tonne of bricks dropping from the sky.
Tyrone lost on Sunday and those boys will have felt for a while like they’d lost absolutely everything.
Yes they were rank outsiders coming up against one of the greatest GAA teams of all time, but they still fancied their chances. That’s what that bubble does to a man.
And they’ll still be hurting. Every single time they allow themselves to drift back to that game they’ll think about the things they could have done differently even though it won’t change a thing now.
That’s just human nature and that’ll hurt them but they’ll also be proud. You convince yourself that winning is the only thing that matters when you’re inside that bubble but when that bubble bursts, you get a bit more perspective about it all.
You realise that you still wouldn’t throw away those sessions in the wind and rain just because you lost. You begin to realise that the journey can be just as important as the destination.
Former Limerick hurler Joe Quaid summed it up perfectly on The GAA Hour Hurling Show recently.
“If I’d won that All-Ireland,” he said, “I often ask myself would my life be much different now?”
It would have been for a while, undoubtedly, but lads move on gradually.
It’s the end of the year now and the Tyrone boys are up in Omagh or somewhere like that hanging out with the lads they’d dogged through January and February with.
Friendships were forged, bonds were made. Unbreakable bonds.
Tyrone player Conall McCann summed up what it means to be part of an inter-county panel nowadays with his Instagram post in the aftermath of the final.
“44 weeks, 85 pitch sessions, 40 gym sessions with these men. Disappointing end to an unbelievable journey. Never been prouder to say I am from Tyrone. I love my teammates and I love this game,” he said.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BnT18Heg-Sj/?taken-by=cmccann71
A scan through those photos will remind him and the Tyrone boys of the good times they had.
125 sessions in 308 days. That’s more than one sessions every three days. That was their whole life for the year. That was their journey.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BnUGw5HgnWH/?taken-by=mbradley631
They wouldn’t give that up for the world.
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