Growing up in Monaghan, Mayo meant nothing to us. We had plenty of soft and craggy boglands ourselves, thanks very much. Stony grey soil too, famously. Maybe that was the only thing connecting us, a kind of default affinity for bad land laments. When I was a kid, there was a fella called Tom Reilly who scored a dinger of a goal for Mayo in the Connacht final one year. It was the only time Mayo football made any impression on me, purely for the fact that my dad said that Reilly was a Monaghan Harps man who had gone to live in Mayo when he got a job in the bank. He may as well have moved to Melbourne, for all the sense I had of scale and distance back then.Later, when they were losing All-Ireland finals to Cork and Meath and Kerry, I never thought of Mayo as anything more than flotsam, really. This was the 1990s so I won’t pretend I was thinking too deeply about these things – or about anything, come to that – but it all seemed fairly straightforward. Some counties win All-Irelands, most counties don’t. Mayo were in the most counties bucket. Ho-hum.And then I met one of them. And then I met his friends. Who then became my friends. Who are, coming up on a quarter of a century later, still my friends. And now it all hits different, somehow.I texted him a few minutes ago to ask when he lived on Mountjoy Square, a five-minute walk from Croke Park. We settled on 2003 to 2007 but we’d be open to a year either way. I remembered a sunny day after an All-Ireland semi-final one year when we all landed back there, about a dozen of us, the fridge filling and the room giddy, Monday morning miles off in the distance. Had to be 2006, I reckoned.Immediately he said that he’d gone straight back to Mayo after the ’06 semi-final. Huh. So maybe it was ’04? But then ’04 was after a replay against Fermanagh, which fell on a Saturday, so we were probably both working late that night, in which case maybe it was the quarter-final against Tyrone. The years squish memories together like playdough after a while.One way or the other, the point is this. After barely giving Mayo football a second thought for the first half of my life, it is unquestionably the county outside my own whose fortunes I’ve spent most time discussing over the past 25 years. At this stage, I’ve been to more Mayo postmortems than Dr Marie Cassidy. There was the one after the 2004 final defeat to Kerry. We were outside Mulligans in Poolbeg Street when all of a sudden there was a commotion as some drunken Mayo fool – not one of our party, it should be stressed – had to be stopped as he tried to take a cigarette lighter to his own Mayo jersey. ‘The mysteries of Mayo football, glorious and sorrowful, remained a constant.’ Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho While some of us – okay, mostly me – tried to paint this as the great Mayo tragedy writ large, the suffering of a generation summed up by a desperate act of self-immolation, it was quietly nailed by the most sensible Mayo woman in our group. “A gobshite looking for attention,” she said. She was right.There was the one after the 2006 final as we sat at a table in either The Long Stone or MacTurcaill’s (now both long gone) and picked the bones out of an even bigger beating from Kerry. “Is the whole country ashamed of us?” asked one of the lads, pleadingly, as The Sunday Game highlights came on. We hid his pints for the rest of the night.[ ‘No obsession over history’: Jack Carney says no ghosts on the Mayo bus to Croke ParkOpens in new window ]The years passed. We got older and wider. We went to festivals together, we danced at each other’s weddings, we met up for poker and talked about our kids and life and everything else. When a gang of them landed up to our house after my dad died, you could see people eyeing them up, half-suspicious. Mayo people at a Monaghan wake? What’s going on there? Didn’t a Harps fella play for them one time?Mayo fans look on nervously during the 2017 All-Ireland final against Dublin. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho Through it all, the mysteries of Mayo football, glorious and sorrowful, remained a constant. My friends had this beautiful torture, year after year through the 2010s, following the best Mayo team of their lives and living in hope right up to the very last moment of the season. And when it was all over, we’d meet up and commiserate and find the laughs in it somewhere. There was one year, not sure which one, where the verdict from one of the lads that night in Fagan’s was: “I suppose it wasn’t the worst final defeat we’ve had.” We all knew what he meant but it sounded a bit like thanking the axeman for keeping his blade good and sharp. There was the year my buddy from Mountjoy Square came home for the final – he had, in fact, moved to Melbourne by now, significantly more than the five-minute walk of the mid-2000s. And of course the game was a draw. And of course the mad hoor came back for the replay a fortnight later. And of course they lost again. He won’t be back this time, the big wuss.[ There is no comparison between Kobe McDonald and David Clifford – except in one vital respectOpens in new window ]The rest of them will though, all dotted throughout the stadium, not really allowing themselves to think that Mayo can win but some part of them not ruling it out either. Middle age has come for us all by now but that’s okay. Some of our group have had a rockier journey to get here than others, so none of us takes it for granted. On Sunday night, whatever the result, we’ll grab a pint and hug it out and talk yards of nonsense about Mayo football. I hope we do it forever.