By then, the ground was empty and silent save for the scattered debris from a county final played in a vicious gale and a couple of media types waiting to try grab a word with Mick Fitzsimons.
Who else? Man of the match. Scorer of 0-2. Dublin legend. Cuala lifer.
Naturally, Fitzsimons was last man out of the dressing room. He made a brief appearance in the corridor a few minutes beforehand, looking for someone to take a picture. Fitzsimons, his brother John, James Power, David Sheerin, Conor O’Brien and Luke Keating.
Cuala’s old guard were the last to leave the house. The young colts had bolted. The old warhorses were drinking in the sweetness of a first county football title in their club’s history.
“Sweet as any,” was Fitzsimons’ verdict. Considering his medal haul, it was a fair appraisal.
“Dublin, when you get in, it’s something you’ve probably thought about as a child. This is something you’ve been thinking about since you were 18. You’ve probably been thinking about making an impact on the adult stage when we were 14 or 15.
“We were one of the [first] Cuala teams that were Division 1. We were probably one of the first teams … the year above us were very good as well.
“We just had so many people who, the time they put into us. We were spoiled. We were down to Kerry at minor. We had Marc Ó Sé and Eoin Brosnan – they were down chatting to us at minor. They invested so much time into us as a group. They gave us belief. It was obviously a slow burner.”
Quite.
Cuala didn’t just win a county title on Sunday, they beat a Kilmacud team in the midst of an era. An epoch. Recent All-Ireland champions. Three county titles in a row.
At a time when the quality of Dublin football has never been more pronounced, they had threatened to reduce the county championship into their own personal fiefdom. It all added to the stew.
To do it with 14 men for that crucial part of the match when the game was either going to be won, or Cuala were going to be discarded as another head mounted on Kilmacud’s wall, was just a seriously impressive thing to do.
No backwards step. No rethink. No rejig. “I think it was the only way,” Fitzsimons shrugged. “We just wanted to stick [to our game-plan]. Going into a game like this against Crokes, who were going for four in a row and had new players coming in this year, they were obviously so strong.
“Teams have been caught worrying about them. We’ve seen other teams get caught maybe by that. We saw ’Boden and [Thomas] Davis put it right up to them. We just wanted to go out and play the same football we’ve been playing.
“We probably had a lot of lads who were playing in their first finals and stuff like that. You’re kind of worrying are they going to get a bit nervous but none of them showed it.
“Austy [Austin O’Malley] was really good and keeping us nice and calm and we went out and played our football. If we had lost, at least we would have been able to look back and say we stuck to our principles.”
In 15 seasons, Fitzsimons has scored one point for Dublin. It came in the 2019 Leinster Championship in an unremarkable win over Louth. On Sunday, he kicked one and then flicked a ball over the head of Shane Walsh to fist a second. Cometh the hour.
“I used to do that at underage,” he noted after.
“It was effective. I think we’ve been very good at working to get into positions like that. When I got there, people were encouraging me to put it over on both occasions so you kind of need that when you’re a corner-back.
“Your spatial awareness isn’t as good when you’re up front. It’s not something you’ve practised all the time.”
All the people in that picture taken on Sunday were all present when Cuala won a Dublin intermediate title in 2012. They were veterans of three Dublin SFC2 finals also, after Cuala were regraded and then won the most superfluous championship in their history, a senior 2 with no promotion due to Covid regulations.
“We played how many senior B finals? Too many,” Fitzsimons said. “We were watching the senior 1 final afterwards thinking, ‘Can we get up to this level?’ We knew when we were down senior B, we got as organised as possible. We gave it a go.
“We doubled down. You had Luke Keating who was travelling from Balbriggan down to Bray and we were saying, ‘Will you stay on?’ It was tough. So it was just phenomenal to get it done for the likes of him, James Power, Coggsy, my brother John. David Sheerin.
“We all got a photo there. We all won an intermediate championship together. We did three senior 2 finals and won the third so we’ve done our stint of near misses and stuff like that. It was well worth it in the end,” concluded the nine-time All-Ireland SFC winner.
