On 25 July 2021, Padraic Joyce's Galway reign appeared to be on a slow boat to nowhere after a second successive Connacht final loss to Mayo.
364 days later, after plenty of soul-searching in the off-season and a winter of renewal, Galway will pitch up in an All-Ireland football final for the first time in just over two decades.
It's a glorious turnaround for Galway football's ultimate modern darling, their greatest forward of the colour television era.
Who knows? If Galway get the job done and secure their own 'La Decima' at the weekend, he may even surpass Sean Purcell, whose exploits are preserved in Pathé News reels, as the county's most revered football figure.
Any murmurings about the regime or his suitability for the role, rather prevalent last autumn, have naturally disappeared amidst the 2022 winning streak.
As he observed to reporters at Galway's press day last week, "it's great when you win a game as manager, you're a tactical genius and when you lose, you haven't a clue."
Joyce's words on assuming the Galway job in late 2019 have been heavily revisited in recent weeks.
"A successful year one is to start off by winning the FBD League, then go on and win the National League and then win the All-Ireland," he told Galway Bay FM's Ollie Turner.
"That's our aim. It might sound far-fetched to a lot of people. I'm not saying we're going to win the All-Ireland in two years' time or three years' time. We're training for the 30th August next year (2020). That's when the final is on. If we don't do that, I'd see it as disappointment."
While this bullish statement of intent wasn't borne out in reality - in more ways than one (we now know that the 2020 All-Ireland final wasn't, in the end, played on the date originally envisioned) - it gave us a sense of one of Joyce's defining traits, huge self-confidence.
"Padraic is a very confident individual in his own ability. That comes across in every aspect of what he does," ex-Galway player Gary Sice tells RTÉ Sport.
"He understands where he wants Galway to be and he's not shy in telling lads where he wants them to be.
"He's giving a confident message across and backing it up with the information required to get the job done. All of that put together is a very potent mix. He's one of the all time greats as far as we're concerned in Galway."
One famous figure from Joyce's neck of the woods certainly raised his eyebrows at the new manager's early mission statement.
"At the time, people would have said, well, you know what now, that's kinda stretching your ambitions a bit," recalls Barna Dearg's Michael Lyster, formerly of The Sunday Game.
"But Padraic - and the Joyces, generally - would be very, not arrogant, but self-confident. He asserts himself.
"He made it very clear that this is what I want to do. And as a guy who played in three All-Irelands and was a star in two of them, he wouldn't have any shyness of seeing Galway there in lights, if you like.
"That's what he's brought forward with this panel of players."
Joyce's own 15-year inter-county career can be divided into a few phases, starting with his inside forward, chief marksman role during Galway's glory days (1998-2001).
Later on, as other totems of the O'Mahony era began to drift away one by one, his socks began to rise a little higher towards his knees as he slipped back into the coveted elegant playmaker role. The high-point of this phase was in 2008 when Galway made an ultimately fleeting resurgence under the management of arch-purist Liam Sammon.
Then there was the twilight years, Galway football's dog days, when they invariably trudged out of the championship after an abject one-point loss to some middling team in high summer. Joyce's last game for Galway was sadly typical of the era, a one-point defeat to Antrim in Casement Park in July 2012.
He arrived as one of the star graduates from the famous Jarlath's 1994 crop - Donellan, Divilly, Meehan et al - who were the rocket fuel which propelled Galway from Connacht's No. 2 team to All-Ireland champions in year one.
"When he came in first, he was quiet enough," recalls Sean Óg De Paor. "It does take a while when you're coming into a panel and you're a young lad. You're not going to be the loudest guy or the alpha male. But you could see his footballing ability straight away. By the time the championship arrived, he would have settled in.
"I remember playing against him in a club league match in Barna Dearg. And I remember saying 'who is this guy?' He was so good. And he was only 16 or 17 at that stage."
In the '98 final, he scored Galway's only goal early in the second half, dummying to leave Kildare keeper Christy Byrne helpless on the ground before firing into an empty net.
His father Paddy attributed his jinking sidestep, as De Paor points out, to Joyce's Irish dancing training as a kid. Joyce himself had more global influences in mind, as he told RTE's Mike McCartney four years ago.
"The night before the final, we were sat in the room in the Berkeley Court Hotel and Match of the Day came on.
"Alan Shearer was going through on goal, Newcastle v Leicester, he feigned to shoot and he went left. (Michael) Donellan was sitting across the room from me, with a bottle of tae in one hand, a chicken sandwich in the other and he managed to muster the words out, 'Oh, you'll do that tomorrow when I pass it to you and go around the keeper.'
"The following day, Michael got the ball and passed it in. I'll never forget looking at the Hogan Stand, the ball coming down and I says, the bottle of tae... Alan Shearer... round the goalie. It's amazing that all that imagery was in the mind."
A perennial Footballer of the Year candidate in those years, Joyce's signature display in the glory days was his 10-point haul - famously five off his left and five off his right boot - as Galway left an oddly flat Meath for dead in the second half of the 2001 final, with nine of his scores coming in the second half.
"In the Gaelic football world, there are blue-chip forwards," says De Paor. "These are the creme de la creme. I'm talking about the likes of Canavan, Cooper, Bernard Brogan, these top-of-the-range guys. And Padraic, in my opinion, is in that company."
As time progressed and Galway - perhaps too well fed after their second All-Ireland victory - retreated from prominence, Joyce evolved his game from a whizz-kid shooter into a veteran string puller on the 40. It was arguably in these latter years that he became pre-eminent in Galway's modern pantheon, his contemporaries from the 98-01 period, De Paor included, marvelling at his longevity.
By then, he was an authority figure and a demanding presence, not shy of the odd withering remark.
"His skillset was frightening," recalls Sice, who played with Joyce from '07 onwards. "To watch his balance and thought patterns, and trying to keep up with his thought patterns was the problem because he was steps ahead of us.
"I was playing wing-back at the time so I was trying to give him the ball and believe me, if it wasn't going in right, you were going to hear about it. I mean that in a good way.
"He always gave good advice. It was always to the point! There was no fluff around it."
After the 2003 season, Joyce played on for Galway for nine more campaigns, they collected just two Connacht titles in that span.
As he aged, there was a worrying sense that the county were growing even more dependent on him. In 2010, in Galway's ill-fated experiment under Joe Kernan, a 33-year old Joyce kicked 0-06, most from play, as they wound up beaten by a single point at home to Wexford in a qualifier.
He was entirely exempt from blame among what remained of the Galway support, coming out for a post-match interview, bluntly noting that "we've let the county down, and not for the first time either".
"It was an embarrassment," recalls Lyster. "He came out and did an interview with us afterwards. It was a bit like one of the guys in Manchester United who had known better times and were now going through the nightmare. I'd say that must have hurt him then."
He remained the biggest beast on the Galway club scene throughout it all, directing games at Tuam Stadium like an over-active traffic warden, while carrying most of the scoring load. Killererin, who had won their only two previous county titles during his uncle Billy's heyday in the late 70s, won four during his era, his brother Tommy and cousin Nicky also inevitably prominent.
The team nose-dived after he stepped away but he returned to rescue them in a relegation play-off against Menlough in 2014.
"Some of his older ex-inter-county team-mates, we were mesmerised," says De Paor. "As he got older, like any player, you don't cover as much ground. But he still managed to influence the game from smaller and smaller patches of the field.
"It got to the point where Padraic had retired altogether but his club the following year were in relegation trouble and out of retirement, he won the game for them and I'd say he didn't move 10 metres in either direction. His force of personality as well, he'd have a strong personality on the pitch, which helped him in his latter years."
When he was appointed as senior manager in late 2019 - having guided the U20s to a Connacht title that summer - there was a perception that he was inclined to do the purists' bidding and swing Galway back towards a more traditional approach, embracing their aristocratic vision of themselves.
However, while he did express an early preference for more foot-passing, he was at pains to credit predecessor Kevin Walsh - "The Daddy of our team" - for modernising Galway football, lifting the team out of their early 2010s torpor and leaving him with an excellent platform.
Sice dismisses the notion that Joyce's approach represented a severe about-turn from the Walsh regime.
"It was an easy thing for people to say but it wasn't reality. We were very pragmatic with Kevin and the system we had with him was a very successful one. We had come from an up and down period and he made us very consistent.
"I think what you have there now is a hybrid of two systems and it's worked really well for the lads that are there."
Joyce made clear his expectation in the skills department. As U20 boss, he'd admitted his disquiet that there were county level players unable to deliver accurate foot passes off both feet. Based on Sice's account, there are echoes of Glenn Hoddle as England manager in France '98, still, at 40 years of age, more technically proficient than the majority of his playing squad.
"He can still do it himself," says Sice. "If you give him a ball now and ask what kind of kick-pass he's demanding or talking about, he can still deliver it there and then."
The bracing initial objective of winning the All-Ireland at the earliest opportunity looked considerably less implausible five rounds into his first league campaign.
Galway won four Division 1 games from five in early 2020, which included a 19-point gutting of Tyrone - albeit a 13-man Tyrone for much of the second half - in Tuam. Their only loss was a one-point defeat in a cracker away to Kerry in Tralee.
Then the world changed abruptly and no team were more rocked by this than Galway. Sice, who returned for a last salvo in the abridged 2020 championship, has a theory on this.
"I can't overstate how hard Covid was from a logistics point of view, a training point of view, trying to get messages across to a brand new team and young lads coming in.
"The whole thing was a nightmare and the teams that had been together over a number of years there weathered it better than the teams that had a new management in. I could see it in there myself that there was a very clear message coming but trying to get sessions together was impossible."
.@Galway_GAA boss Pádraig Joyce on his unflinching belief in the squad at his disposal - All-Ireland final live on @RTE2, @RTERadio1 and @RTEsport Online from 2pm #GAA #rtegaa pic.twitter.com/XpT0Cg30Z2
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Then followed two years of frustration, during which, as Joyce admitted last week, he began to doubt himself and endured 'rough' nights. They won only two from nine games, across league and championship, during the pandemic, both against Roscommon.
One got the overwhelming sense that losing to Mayo two years running stuck in Joyce's craw immensely. In a piece of reminiscence for a bank website ahead of Galway's qualifier with Mayo in 2019, Joyce said that as a player, he "had a huge rivalry with Mayo, which bordered on hatred," citing the 1999 Connacht final loss in Tuam - when the straw-hat wearing Mayo hordes invaded the pitch, a number of them proceeding to dig clumps out of the playing surface - as a particularly "sickening" defeat.
Late last year, video footage emerged of a club night, where one Mayo wag, with a few drinks on board presumably, in the Q&A chided Joyce about finding management harder than playing. As the crowd whooped and yahood, Joyce grabbed the mic and responded with some (possibly theatrical) venom - "Sorry Des (Cahill, the moderator) I have to answer that f****n' stupid question. If I was born in Mayo, ye'd have had f****n' five All-Irelands."
While he wrote that he had "mellowed out" and now had "huge respect" for Mayo GAA, the despair after 2020 and 2021 was real.
In the off-season, the backroom team was strengthened, the high-profile Cian O'Neill arriving as selector and coach, Bernard Dunne coming in on the psychology side.
Ex-Kerry manager Eamonn Fitzmaurice argued on the RTÉ GAA podcast that week that Joyce had absorbed the lessons of defeats and adopted a more "pragmatic" mindset for his third season.
Eamonn Fitzmaurice believes a couple of big defeats made Padraic Joyce a more pragmatic manager.
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A whopping 86 players have been used in his tenure and the degree of turnover since the 2018 All-Ireland semi-final has been startling as well as a nod to the depth of the players base in Galway. Only four of the starting team that lost to Dublin in '18 began the game against Derry.
Even after securing promotion from Division 2 in spring, there was a sense of 'make or break' around the Connacht championship with Mayo in Castlebar last April. Joyce's strikingly emotional celebrations on the sideline after the one-point win told a tale - "and I'd say there were celebrations for a day or two after that, as well," adds De Paor.
Since then, Galway have taken flight. In another of the echoes of 1998 that are suddenly reverberating around the place, Joyce revealed this week that Pat Comer, in as goalkeeping coach, has been filming around the squad this year. The manager acknowledged the parallels between the two years after Galway had, again, beaten Derry in the semi-final.
"I really admire him for taking on the job," says De Paor. "And Kevin (Walsh) before him as well, with the football careers that they had, they could easily have sat back. But their attitude is - 'once more into the breach'."
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