The tumbling, whirligigging strangeness of the 2026 championship probably needs only one day to sum it up. On May 23rd, Donegal waltzed to a 2-20 to 0-16 win over Kerry in Killarney. In the nine decades that championship matches have been played in Fitzgerald Stadium, Kerry had never lost by double-digits to anybody.On that same weekend, Dublin were scrabbling in the sand, trying to find something – anything – to keep their season alive. They had been beaten the previous Sunday by Westmeath in the Leinster final. They would go on to lose again the following weekend, this time to Louth. This is the first time in history that Dublin have lost two matches back-to-back in the same season.Yet here they all are, in the upside-down. Kerry are humming. Donegal are gone. And Dublin, out of nowhere, have discovered themselves again. Whatever happens now, that win over Jim McGuinness’s side last Sunday is a lifebuoy. It gets their nose above the waterline, for now. And maybe into the future too.“Last weekend was huge,” says Brian Fenton. “Now, will it be worth much if they were to lose this weekend? I actually think it will. Even in the winter months, Ger will be showing clips of that Donegal game to them. That will be the basis of analysis, for team meetings, team identity, the impact of finishers, decision making. All that serves as good material to get them through the winter.”Even now, a week of dust-settling later, it’s hard to overstate the significance of beating Donegal last Sunday. Rarely in the past 20 years has a Dublin team needed a big win as badly. Mayo in 2015? Sure, but even though they’d lost to Donegal at the same stage the previous year, nobody doubted that they were going to be around for a while. The 2011 All-Ireland? Maybe, if only to close off a 16-year-old wound. But while losing a final hurts, there’s comfort in knowing you did most things right across the season. You’d probably have to go back as far as the 2010 quarter-final against Tyrone, after they’d shipped five goals against Meath in Leinster and had the Startled Earwigs day against Kerry at the same stage 12 months before.Dublin's Eoghan O'Gara celebrates with Bernard Brogan after scoring a goal against Tyrone in the 2010 All-Ireland quarter-final. Photograph: Donall Farmer/Inpho That’s how bad things were for Dublin before last week. Had Dublin lost to Donegal, 2026 was a complete bust. Worse, it would have come on the back of 2025, which wasn’t much better. They’d have changed manager, transformed the panel, gone to war with the president – and for what? Relegation to Division Two and championship wins over Wicklow, Louth and Cavan.“A win like that was needed,” Fenton says. “Just because it was Donegal and it was a fighting performance, spirited and everything else. The older lads who had been questioned, like Ciarán Kilkenny and Brian Howard, they really stood up and I think that’s a massive thing and a sign of a great group. Ger [Brennan] is back and the leaders are coming to the fore. [ Darragh Ó Sé: Dublin are on a high, but Galway have been building quietly and fear nobodyOpens in new window ]“It screams to me that getting Ger back has been massively beneficial. Just in terms of how settled the group is; the leadership, the communication, the instructions. The decision-making around substitutions, team selections, all of that. Everything seems so much more settled now.“Compare it to four or five weeks ago and it looked like Dublin were in total chaos and turmoil. If you watch extra-time in the Leinster final and extra-time last Sunday, they’re chalk and cheese. The comparison is stark, if you look at how the subs coming in did their jobs, how instructions were getting across. “Even I was looking at the huddle at half-time in extra-time the last day, it looked completely different to the Leinster final. It looked more professional, more settled, more calm about the situation.”These are all intangibles, of course. But they matter. Even if the season ends this weekend, if Galway prove a rung too high on the ladder for the Dubs in Brennan’s first year, pulling off a big win against a proper contenders feels like it will have a long tail. Whatever about it being that way among the playing staff, at least now there’s something for the Dublin public to get behind.Dublin manager Ger Brennan on the sideline at Sunday's Donegal match. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho There’s talk of 70,000 coming to Croke Park this Sunday – the equivalent round last year saw 61,659 through the gates. The other three counties will play their part in that too but Dublin should always be bulk suppliers in a crowd like that. We’ll see.“There has been a big fall-off,” Fenton says. “Everyone could see it. Whatever it was, 16,000 at the Louth game after the Leinster final. That’s been coming for a while now. I could feel it even when I was playing, there was that drop off, that sense of supporter fatigue. We were very spoiled and got very used to winning.“But as a player, you get really worried about that. At the same time, the hurlers sold out Parnell Park. I know it’s a way smaller capacity but that’s a big occasion. It gives you a real connection with the supporters. The footballers badly needed something like that, to get everyone singing for them again. Hopefully it snowballs from there.[ Tributes paid as Galway two-time All-Ireland winner Paul Clancy dies aged 49Opens in new window ]“That’s why I think, regardless of what happens for the rest of the way this summer, they should definitely go and play their Division Two games in Parnell Park in the league next year. I think that’s a no-brainer. You get that interaction again, you get families coming on to the pitch at the end, kids coming up to get their jerseys signed and get pictures taken. The impact that has on young Dublin fans is huge and they haven’t had it for a long time because everything is in Croke Park.”Next year will bring what it will bring. For now, a notable aspect of the win over Donegal was the infusion of new blood that had its say. Charlie McMorrow is the first new Dublin defender to look ready-made since Lee Gannon arrived in 2022. Seán Guiden only made his debut coming off the bench in this year’s Leinster final but has scored seven points in three substitute appearances so far, including two two-pointers.In all, Brennan has handed out eight championship debuts in this campaign. If that would be a lot in times of plenty, it’s a deluge in the current state of affairs – you would always prefer to be blooding players in a winning set-up rather than a losing one. Another reason the win over Donegal came at just the right time.“When you’re only starting out, you want to be impressing the leaders in the group,” says Fenton. “You want to be showing what you can do and how you can contribute. But if you’re out there in the middle of a 10-point drubbing, it’s a lot harder to do that. There’s huge expectation on the leaders and you nearly don’t want to be getting in the way. When you’re losing, it’s a tough place to be.“Winning last week, especially winning in extra-time, that brings everyone together. Because no matter how many plans you’ve made or what contingencies you’ve come up with, extra-time in a championship game is total chaos. Everybody’s drained, everybody is running on adrenaline. “The physios might have to split up to see what they can get out of tired bodies. Even on basic numbers, more people get a game. I see some counties putting players back on for extra-time but Dublin haven’t really done that. So you get a real sense in the group of everybody having something to add. And then to win it in the way they did, essentially winning it twice, it’s massive for morale.”All the same, it’s still just one win. When David Gough throws the ball in the air at four o’clock on Sunday, it counts for no more and no less than everyone else’s victories to date. Fenton has been a Dublin player and supporter long enough to know the Ts and Cs. “That’s what I’d be thinking about as a player all week. What did we really beat? How good are Donegal, really? A great team on paper but they lost to Down and they lost to Cork. So if I was still playing, that would be the thing that would be in my head. It was a great win and it felt like a great win. But we’ll see on Sunday what effect it had.”