It mightn’t always seem like it to Mayo fans, but this is a golden era for their county’s footballers.
The past 20 years have brought plenty of heartache, with six All-Ireland defeats since 1996, with countless near-misses and hard-luck stories.
Amidst all the disappointment though, Mayo have marked themselves out as one of the premier football counties in the game and they have everything bar the All-Ireland title to show for it.
Only the game’s kingpins Kerry have been in more Sam Maguire deciders in the past two decades and exactly half of the past 20 All-Ireland winners have had to get past Mayo before climbing the steps of the Hogan Stand.
Considering Mayo went without so much as a Connacht title through the 1970’s and only won two Nestor Cups in the 60s, these can rightly be considered good times.
The Green Above the Red have taken 11 provincial crowns since 1996, with their dominance out west particularly pronounced in recent years.
Between 2011 and 2015, for four years under James Horan and last season under the joint-guidance of Pat Holmes and Noel Connelly, they didn’t lose a single game in Connacht and their stranglehold following a five in-a-row was only broken by Galway this summer.
In 2016 they reached their sixth consecutive All-Ireland semi-final - something the county had never achieved before - and they are now getting ready for their seventh final in 20 years.
In the past two years they have only bowed out after losing to the eventual All-Ireland champions, on both occasions after pulsating last-four replays.
Mayo have been a fixture at the business end of the season for pretty much all of this decade and whatever happens on Sunday they have achievements they can be proud of.
The county’s footballers became something of an object of ridicule after their All-Ireland final capitulations against the Kingdom in 2004 and ’06, when both games were practically done and dusted before the break.
Those days are gone and first-year manager Stephen Rochford presides over one of the hardest-to-beat, edgy and streetwise sides in the game.
Dublin are hot favourites and they might well beat Mayo in Sunday’s showpiece, but they don’t expect to have anything easy.
Players like Lee Keegan, the O’Connor brothers Cillian and Diarmuid, Colm Boyle, Keith Higgins and Aidan O’Shea are born competitors.
Since their infamous All-Ireland qualifier defeat to Longford in 2010, which marked the end of John O’Mahony’s term in charge, they have rarely failed to perform on the Championship stage.
Horan’s first Connacht game as boss was against London in 2011 and they got through that one after extra-time by the skin of their teeth in Ruislip. That season ended in a nine-point semi-final defeat to Kerry, but that scoreline doesn’t tell how competitive a game it was.
Their only real systems failure came in this year’s Connacht defeat to Galway when they looked stuck to the ground, but since then they’ve bounced back to make another All-Ireland semi-final.
The Boys in Blue won’t be underestimating Mayo at Croke Park this weekend and no one else should be either.
