Armagh manager Kieran McGeeney was still coming down from the high of his team topping their All-Ireland round-robin group when his phone vibrated and a text came through from Galway boss Pádraic Joyce.
Earlier that day, the sides had met in Sligo and the Orchard County had nabbed a fairly undeserved draw that ensured they topped the group with Galway instead heading to the All-Ireland preliminary quarter-finals.
In the aftermath, Joyce decided to set the terms.
"After the game in Sligo he said he'd see us in the final, we’ll our win our games, you win yours and we’ll blow this championship open," McGeeney revealed of the conversation.
"I haven’t asked him yet who he said was going to win it!
"Pádraic is a good fella, we get on pretty well. We were on All-Star trips, Aussie Rules together, different things.
"That era of football, Joyce, (Trevor) Giles, (Seamus) Moynihan, was a good era to play football in, not so much to run after those types of boys. Joyce himself was a great player. We go back a long way."
'We’ll win our games, you win yours’ – Joyce and McGeeney kept up their end of the bargain and it all comes to a head at Croke Park on Sunday.
Between them, from that day in Markievicz Park, Dublin, Kerry, Donegal, Monaghan and Roscommon have been dumped from the Championship at their hands meaning for the first time since Cork’s win over Down in 2010, Dublin, Kerry or Mayo aren’t main characters in the season finale.
McGeeney, the sole Armagh captain to ever lift the Sam Maguire, is only the fourth person to take the Orchard County to the final after John Vallely (1953), Gerry O’Neill (1977), the brother of former Republic of Ireland boss Martin, and Joe Kernan (2002 and ’03).
Rewind the clock a few months though, and McGeeney’s future in the role looked uncertain.
Clubs were to have their say, and although the end result was fairly emphatic in his favour, pockets of discontent were vocal and the canvassing was very active.
McGeeney provided a strong rebuttal to RTÉ Sport when it was put to him that it must have been a difficult start to the year, but it would have been impossible to stop all the criticism seeping through.
The shield came from the players, bewildered by both the level and tone of critique howled at their manager and also the fact that they seemed immune from it too despite playing key roles in the four penalty shoot-out losses that cost them two Ulster titles and two All-Ireland semi-final spots.
The manager, for his part, helped create the beast by being the figurehead of a team that enjoyed unprecedented success for the county in the late ‘90s and noughties.
Football in the Orchard County has been at a minnow level over the last decade, success at underage or club success basically non-existent until the minors reached this year’s All-Ireland final and Cullyhanna won the All-Ireland Intermediate Club title in January.
For context, Joyce played in four All-Ireland finals including a replay in 2000 during his career. Armagh have played in four altogether in their existence.
McGeeney has been quick to remind people of Armagh’s standing in recent weeks, even as they negotiated the latter rounds of the championship.
"You hate putting a perspective on it and I know a lot of people think it’s excuses, but our underage hasn’t been good," he told RTÉ Sport.
"Aidan (O’Rourke, minor manager) did a fantastic job this year as did Barry (O’Hagan, U20 manager) and we’re trying to get back to where we were.
"We had a very strong club thing going for a while but even it’s toned down outside the county.
"Cullyhanna was great to see and we’re seeing the benefits of that with Jason (Duffy), Ross (McQuillan) and Aidan (Nugent) in terms of their ability to finish out games and having that cool head.
"The big thing we’ve been trying to do with this group is get them across the line and hopefully try and sustain a period where our younger people see that.
"Whether people like it or not, it’s not academies, it’s not money – and that does help – but it’s shop window. It’s why all our kids love Man United or Limerick hurling, all of those things.
"The better the shop window we can have the better the heroes and role models we can have for the young group to look up to, and the better chance we have of producing better underage and better club."
Victory on Sunday and McGeeney will join an elite group alongside the likes of Kevin Heffernan, Tony Hanahoe (both Dublin), Páidí Ó Sé (Kerry), Billy Morgan (Cork), Hughie O’Reilly (Cavan) and Brian Dooher (Tyrone) to both lift Sam Maguire as captain and manager.
That the Kernan-era team only lifted Sam Maguire once is a source of great debate even amongst the team itself. For the likes of Benny Tierney, it was a period when his dreams came true, but for the man in front of him that day, Mullaghbawn club-mate Enda McNulty, there will also be that sense that more should have been done. Across the squad, viewpoints are different.
McGeeney pits himself somewhere in the middle.
"Regret, the things about regrets is that you can only regret what you can control.
"In terms of preparation and getting ready for it, I felt I gave as much as I could.
"So I don’t know whether you can regret, there are some things outside your control. You have no power over that so not much point having regrets over that because even if you look back to it, you can’t change it.
"We had a great team, we could have achieved more but we didn’t for various reasons.
"There were a lot of good teams there at that time too, the Kerry team and the Tyrone team. Listen, we were in good company.
"It wasn’t just us giving everything, they were playing well too.
"Probably looking back at what I give, I try not to have regrets. I’m probably not in the same boat as Enda or Benny, I’m probably between the two of them."
Watch the All-Ireland Football Championship final, Armagh v Galway, on Sunday from 2.15pm on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player. Follow a live blog on rte.ie/sport and the RTÉ News app and listen to commentary on RTÉ Radio 1
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