Jordan Flynn is looking down at his two arms, one heavily inked with a range of tattoos, the other an entirely blank canvas.There isn’t a whole pile of space remaining on the Mayo player’s left arm so the right one may finally come into play. After winning the All-Ireland and ending a famine, some sort of commemorative tattoo seems a given?“I probably will,” the Crossmolina man said, nodding. “I don’t know where I’ll put it now, but I’ll put it somewhere. I did think about it, maybe a date or maybe go full on and put Sam Maguire on it. I don’t know. I’d probably go for something a bit more subtle, something with maybe a date.”Speaking of dates, did he realise that Sunday, July 26th, when Mayo overcame the curse and finally won their All-Ireland, was exactly three months on from their 10-point Connacht semi-final loss to Roscommon on April 26th?“I didn’t realise they were the dates at all,” Flynn said, shaking his head. “But it’s not been a bad few months, how it worked out for us.”Jordan Flynn, Aidan O'Shea, Jack Coyne and Eoin McGreal celebrate with staff at Temple Street children's hospital, Dublin, on Monday. Photograph: Tom Maher/INPHO That’s the thing about Flynn: there were any number of points throughout his season, and career, when the last thing you might have expected was for him to win an All-Ireland with Mayo.Last winter, for example, the 27-year-old wasn’t even sure he was going to go again in the green and red.“When you’re playing football for that long, it kind of becomes very taxing,” Flynn, a club and county stalwart, said. “Obviously you’re enjoying playing football and I would never have stepped away because of the football side of it. It was more from the side of, like, I’m getting married at the end of this year and there’s things you are missing out on. I have a lot of friends that I wouldn’t see as often as I’d like.“They are going to concerts or group holidays or whatever. My partner, Jessie, is great and keeps me grounded. But there’s also some things that I feel she misses out on because of where I am.”[ Mayo’s Kobe McDonald: ‘A whirlwind... I feel like I blinked and it was all over, it’s been immense’ ]One of the things that ultimately convinced Flynn to stick around for 2026 was the addition of his brother, Kobe McDonald. If Mayo won nothing at all, just getting to play alongside his sibling for a season was going to be a thrill.And so, when the hooter sounded for full-time on Sunday, after Kerry were defeated, the pair locked up in a deep embrace. Later on, they lifted the Sam Maguire Cup together.All of that occurred yards from where Flynn experienced surely his lowest moment in a Mayo jersey. That was back in 2018 when, playing for the under-20s in the All-Ireland final against Kildare, he was sent off and subsequently shoved referee Niall Cullen before leaving the pitch. It ended up in an 18-week suspension. Another point along the journey when Flynn could easily have opted out.Mayo's Jordan Flynn: 'I could have stayed away from football.' Photograph: Ryan Byrne/INPHO “I probably took a lot of heat after that and it was obviously well deserved,” Flynn said. “I suppose now, getting to look back on everything, winning a league, a Connacht and an All-Ireland over the years as well, getting to look back on that moment and say I could have went one of two ways.“I could have stayed away from football or whatever. In a strange way, I suppose it probably helped me a bit because at the time I was gone, I’d done a lot of partying, a lot of fun stuff.“After it was finished, I was like, ‘I don’t really want to do any more of that. I’d like to give it a right crack’. Obviously now, when you’re sitting here talking as an All-Ireland champion, it’s definitely worth it. It was the right decision.”He said he learned all sorts of valuable lessons from the 2018 episode.“Obviously, having Tommy [Conroy] and Ryan [O’Donoghue] as well on the team that day, you do feel like you let a few people down,” Flynn said.“Obviously my family side of it as well. There was a lot of stuff, my character and how they raised me and things like that were called into question. That’s not something that you want to delve too much into.“I look back on it with fond memories and also, I would say, not-so-fond memories as well. It definitely was a turning point for me as well.”