Before last year's Meath county final, Colm O'Rourke had said that Simonstown's failure to win a club championship was "a pebble in my shoe".
Last October, the shoe was emptied out and the pebble fired into the Boyne.
Simonstown demolished Donoghmore-Ashbourne by nine points to claim their first ever Meath club championship victory.
O'Rourke has won two All-Ireland senior football titles, five Leinster titles and a Footballer of the Year award (1991). He also won two senior county medals as a player with Skryne, achieved in the twilight of his career after a great deal of earlier heartache.
And yet, he says that seeing his adopted club winning the 2016 Meath championship was among his most satisfying moments in football.
Based in Navan for most of his professional life, O'Rourke remained with his native club Skryne for the entirety of his playing career.
From the early 90s onwards, however, once his son Shane joined the club, O'Rourke has been involved with Simonstown, looking after underage teams at first and later getting involved at senior level.
"I had coached nearly the whole lot of them, at either underage or schools or both. These are players that I'd have been involved with for 10, 15 or 20 years in some cases, so I think I got as much satisfaction out of seeing them winning as I did for anything else in football.
"When you have children, I think, you get more satisfaction out of their achievements than your own. I'm like that anyway. I'd prefer Shane winning more than me. Most fathers are like that."
After years spent nurturing the contemporaries of his sons, O'Rourke stepped up to manage the senior side at the beginning of 2003, immediately guiding them to two county finals in a row.
Both finals were lost, the first of them after surrendering a nine point lead at half-time. After a couple more years of frustration and near misses, he would step away "before I was pushed".
He returned to the job a couple of years back. Last year came deliverance.
On Sunday, freed of the psychological baggage that comes with not having won a championship, Simonstown go in search of back-to-back titles.
Summerhill, the club of Mick Lyons, and more recently, the Meath champions of 2011 and 2013, greet them in the final this time. Unlike Donoghmore-Ashbourne, who were still searching for their maiden title, Summerhill are a traditionally powerful club in the county.
"Once you win one, it takes the pressure off. Especially as the club had never won one. It also showed fellas what it took to win and they got a liking for it.
"Simonstown were senior for quite a while. Lost two finals back in 2003 and 2004 and then went through a period where they struggled a little bit.
"To come back and win one then, it solidified Simonstown as a proper senior club. Because Simonstown were always in the shadow of (Navan) O'Mahony's in the town.
"Simonstown were always the poor relation. But now, we are a serious club in our own right."
Unsurprisingly for someone deeply immersed in club football and with a considerable platform in the national media, O'Rourke hasn't been shy about contributing to the fraught club v county debate that has flared up in recent years.
The outgoing Director General Paraic Duffy and his central council colleagues has performed some radical surgery on the inter-county championship structure.
Their tinkering, they say, will create more inter-county games, but in a tighter time-frame, thus allowing more leeway for counties to run off their club championships at a halfway reasonable time of year.
The world doesn't need another championship structure article at the present juncture but O'Rourke has fairly emphatic views on the subject.
"I think it's going to make it worse. Much worse, in fact. You're not going to see your club players during the league.
"Between January and April, a club won't see their county men. And the Championship is going to start early in May.
"I don't see county managers releasing their players much for the month of April. I can see clubs being without their county players for the first six or seven months of the year.
"The reality of it is that if a county is playing in the Championship in the first week in May, county managers are not going to be releasing fellas to play in club matches at a time when the county team are supposedly preparing for the biggest game of their year.
The decision to move the All-Ireland finals forward by a month, ostensibly to benefit the clubs, does not impress O'Rourke much either.
"I don't think it does anything. There's only two counties involved at the end of August anyway.
"Here in school, we always run draws, we'd always create a bit of hype around the All-Ireland. I think September was a great time of the year to have All-Ireland finals in terms of promotion. That's all gone.
"I don't see any benefits to it. I see costs to it. People always look forward to September for the All-Irelands and there's going to be no big-time football between August and February.
His own solution is one which the GAA has pronounced politically unpalatable. Namely, get rid of the provincial championship and introduce a tiered system.
"My thing would be that it's time to get rid of bloody provincial championships because they're not serving any purpose. Apart from perhaps the Munster hurling and the Ulster football.
"I think you need a tiered league championship and that would solve all problems because you could plan fixtures for everybody at the start of the year. It wouldn't be dependent on whether a team had won the opening round of their provincial championship. So I think a tiered championship, like the way they're basically having in hurling, is the way forward."
Clubs have lots of games, stresses O'Rourke. It is the uncertainty that is frustrating for club players. The inability to plan for anything.
"There is frustration among players, particularly about Championship games, and not being able to plan for them.
"But people throw out this thing lightly that clubs have no games. That's actually not true. And it's particularly not true in Meath because, to give Simonstown as an example, since February, we have played 21 competitive games.
"Now, that's a lot of football for club players. It means they've had two or three matches per month. But the big problem is not knowing when they would be playing championship matches with their club.
"So, if the county is successful, they could go months without playing a Championship match."
