The greatest advantage to watching your county play a big game when I was in America was the time difference. You didn’t have all day to wait, be nervous and count down the hours because the game was on at 10:30am, so you got up, had the breakfast and the game was on.

This always suited me, as the day of a Clare match I’d be up at the crack of dawn anyway, unable to sleep with anticipation. If the Banner played championship hurling Monday to Friday I could dispense with the alarm clock forever!

The disadvantage was not being there.

It is a very surreal feeling to walk out of a bar at noon in the middle of New York after a match as all kinds of everything walks and drives past you, trains are running over and under you, nobody knowing nor caring that there was a match on. Not a sign of a flag!

As a teenager I’d often mistake the beeping of a car horn in these situations as coming from someone celebrating a Munster or All-Ireland win. It never was.

That was the anticlimax. Sharing the thrill of victory or seeking the company required to assuage a defeat was never easy in the heat of the Bronx of a summer Sunday.

These were the days home felt the furthest away.

I’ll be taking my 15-year-old daughter to see Kerry and Mayo this Sunday. But we won’t be going to Croke Park. Instead, she will take a trip down memory lane with me as we find a suitable pub in Queens.

Eleanor was born and reared in Kerry so she’ll have her Kerry jersey on and will expect nothing less than a Kingdom victory. I have no issue with that. But I already know she’ll have an issue with all of the stories I am going to be telling her about how we used to stay in touch with home by watching these games together, thousands of miles from home, way (way!) back in the 1980s.

I have no shortage of tales.

Back then I saw it all. Grown men crying after matches with the joy and often sorrow of it all. Hundred dollar bills being exchanged following bets. Former players watching their former team mates win All-Irelands, having passed up that rare opportunity of a celtic cross, to leave it all behind for a job in the States.

Psychologists would have had a field day watching it all unfold. I had a front row seat.

Tradition

You don’t need to go to the pub anymore because modern technology allows our USA brethren to watch the games in their own homes if they see fit, but I’m a stickler for tradition!

It’s not about drink, it’s about mingling with those in the same boat – those prepared to get up early to see the match because it means something to them. It was and is our identity.

Danny Lynch was one such man. He was in New York for well over 50 years, but in his mind’s eye he never left his beloved Kerry or home place in Dingle. If there ever was a Kingdom mafia in the city, Danny was the Godfather. He would take no offence to that term because it is meant in the best possible way.

If you were from Kerry, Danny probably heard you were coming over and the bush telegraph would get working, jobs and accommodation would be sought. If it involved staying a few nights in Danny and Bridget’s home in Yonkers, then so be it. He was a driving force in the Kerry Association in New York for decades. Danny looked after his own.

I thought of him this week because on a return trip back in 1999 I stayed a lovely weekend with Danny and Bridget. The Munster final was that Sunday and at 8am Danny was gently tapping on my bedroom door.

“C’mon young fella, we’re late for Pairc Uí Chaoimh!” A bit like me, Danny didn’t sleep late the day his county played championship.

Over breakfast, about an hour from throw-in, he was able to tell me it was pouring rain in Cork and who had passed a late fitness test three thousand miles away. There was no internet in them days but Danny’s sources were impeccable. It might have helped that his nephew, also Danny, was the long renowned PRO of the GAA.

We watched the game in a pub close to his home, won by Cork 2-10 to 2-4 on a wet pitch. He shook hands, laughed and joked with his Cork friends, he wished them well later on in the championship. We’ll be back next year please God he said. And they were. He lost as gracefully as he won. He was a Kerryman, he could afford to.

Danny passed away three years ago, but I have no doubt he’ll be up early again this Sunday to see his native Kerry in Croke Park. And he’ll see the Kingdom reach yet another All-Ireland final this Sunday because they are built for such occasions.

They’ll win too.

Mayo’s struggles

Mayo, being Mayo, couldn’t help themselves when seeing off Roscommon and delivering their best performance in some time in Croke Park. Everything clicked for them on a day that they would have gotten by with the performances that seen them scrape past Derry, Clare and Cork. Nothing else that dictates when perfect days like that arrive. Much as you’d like to order them up every day, that doesn’t happen. When it does you must simply enjoy it.

It would take a similar seventy minutes, with the same clinical attitude in front of goal to beat the Kingdom. Only this time it will be against a team that are programmed to withstand such onslaughts and one that tends to lessen their length and impact. In other words, lightning will not strike twice in one summer.

Mayo have the capable personnel, and despite being on the road a long time still have the hunger too. But that nagging and mostly infuriating habit of bringing themselves and their supporters to the edge of ecstasy, before throwing it all into the abyss is never far away.

The talk of the top four always includes Mayo, but the other three have won All Irelands in the last decade or so, something Mayo have never quite managed. I sadly suspect that this year’s quest ends on Sunday. For myself and Eleanor, that will be somewhere around the Half Way Line, my uncle’s bar, which is showing the match live on Queens Boulevard.

We’ll sit. We’ll watch. And eventually someone will say: “Wouldn’t it be great to be there.”

Enjoy and savour it if you are. CL