Mayo were cruising for a bruising against Meath - but a ferocious fightback led to the most remarkable comeback story of 2026

Sam Callinan knows what the old Mayo would have done. They would have died.

Not literally, obviously. But they would have found a way to lose to Meath, then spent the summer wondering what might have been.

And when Kerry went seven points clear inside 15 minutes of the All-Ireland final, they might have looked at the scoreboard, looked at each other and wondered if a familiar story was about to start again. Only it wasn't the old Mayo any more.

This was a different animal - a team that wasn't prepared to give it up simply because that was what people expected them to.

“The Meath game was when everything changed for us,” Callinan says.

“In prior years, we would have capitulated and lost that game. That's another year down the drain. But we said ‘no’ and I think it just spoke to the character of the team that we said we were not going to lose that game. We made a few tactical adjustments, wrestled back momentum, got over the line, and then it was just building blocks from there.

“We were a lot more solid defensively against Cork. We had the two weeks to work on a few of the faults in our systems against Meath. You can just see different bits and pieces that we were working on during the year take form. It ended up being somewhat of a finished product by the final.”

There is something rather lovely about that description of an All-Ireland-winning team. A finished product. As if Mayo had been working away in a garage somewhere, tightening a few screws and replacing a dodgy part, until suddenly the thing started running like a Rolls-Royce.

But there was nothing straightforward about getting there.

One of the awkward realities of being a Mayo footballer is that, sooner or later, life tends to take you somewhere else.

There is no university in Mayo, for a start. Its biggest town, Castlebar, has a population of around 13,000. The opportunities that come with education and employment are often to be found elsewhere, which is why the county has a rather different relationship with geography than some of its rivals.

At one stage this season, 11 of the squad were living in Dublin. They would meet at the Spa Hotel in Lucan, pile onto a bus and head west to Castlebar. Training, recovery and the journey home could turn the whole exercise into a ten-hour round trip.

It is an extraordinary amount of travelling for an amateur footballer to undertake, particularly when you remember that the same people are also trying to get through college, hold down jobs and maintain something resembling a normal life.

By the end of the season, there were only three Dublin-based players left.

Callinan is studying Corporate Law in UCD. There are likely to be more opportunities for him in the capital when he finishes, and the prospect of a career as a solicitor is not something that can simply be put on hold indefinitely.

He has two years of a Masters ahead of him, though, and for now there is no ambiguity about where his priorities lie.

“You have to take every year in isolation. It's hugely important. I have two years of a Masters that I'm fully committed to Mayo,” he says.

“After that, you just have to see where it takes you. You have to realise that there's a life outside of football. I've always been a big proponent of that. But I love football more than anything else.

“At the end of the day, it's an amateur sport. I'm doing quite a time-intensive course. Obviously, hoping to qualify as a solicitor would be quite time-intensive as well. But I just think that's something that I'll address when the time comes. For the next two years, I'm fully committed to Mayo.”

And there, really, is the bargain.

You give up a fair bit of your life to play for Mayo. You spend weekends on buses, evenings in training and countless hours trying to get your body into a condition where it can withstand the demands of championship football. You make sacrifices that are difficult to explain. But then you get July 26.

Seventy-five years of waiting came to an end. A county that had spent generations falling just short suddenly had Sam Maguire in its hands.

And what followed was something that even the players themselves had difficulty anticipating.

The walk across Achill Island. The 100 Pipers bringing the cup over the bridge. The flotilla of boats welcoming it to the island. The hospital and school visits, the trips to the homes of sick supporters, the homecoming in Castlebar.

It was a county falling in love with its footballers all over again.

“Yeah, it is truly something that kind of defies description in terms of us as a playing group,” he says.

“I think it's such a visceral feeling. The pride, most of the vindication of a lot of us have put in a lot of time and hours.

“I'm one of the younger members of the playing group. A lot of our older player group would have famously come so close so many times. So there's a huge mix of emotions that come into it in terms of relief and satisfaction.

“And then obviously it's just a whirlwind of emotions, meeting people in your community, meeting people around different towns and stuff.

“As athletes, I think we can kind of separate ourselves from the emotional side of football. We're athletes, we go to training, we do our analysis, we prepare our bodies. You're thinking of tactics and match-ups.

“You're not thinking of someone travelling up from Ballyhaunis to go to Croke Park, who's been doing it for the past 20 years.”

And then you win it, and suddenly you are.

“When something like winning All-Irelands happens, it kind of all comes crashing down on you, that there's this whole other world, this whole interconnection, this web of different communities and different stories,” he says.

“And people telling you what it means to them. So I think it's very emotive and something I wouldn't have really expected when I envisioned as a kid winning All-Irelands.

“You think going up and you're getting your medal and your trophy and you go home and you have a few pints with the lads, but there's a whole other layer of it.

“And I just found it really eye-opening and just kind of beautiful in its own way that there's so many people who care so much about it. And just to see the joy it brings is really special.”

If you want to know when the penny finally dropped, when the whole business stopped feeling like a wonderful dream and became something real, Callinan has a moment.

It happened on the train home from Dublin.

The players had spent Sunday in the capital, doing their bits and pieces, before boarding the train west with their partners. There was great craic on board, as you would expect. But the further they travelled into Connacht, the more they began to realise that something rather extraordinary was waiting for them.

People were lining the platforms in Roscommon and Castlerea. They were getting off the train at different stops and seeing crowds of people gathered to catch a glimpse of them.

“Jeez, this might be bigger than we were expecting,” they began to think.

Then they arrived in Castlebar.

“I think nobody really could comprehend the scale of what celebrations would be like, but when we got off the platform in Castlebar, there was a bridge on the train station, lined with people, and the platform was absolutely packed,” he says.

“That's a moment that made me think, wow, this is actually real.

“It's not just something that happened yesterday that was a dream. So that was probably a really special moment.”

And one he wants to repeat next year.