Mayo’s victory was the greatest sporting occasion I’ll ever attend. How could anything beat it?

No one left, of course. We all know that. The Kerry fans realised 30 seconds after the final whistle that although the game had gone, what they were now experiencing was a cultural event of genuinely historic importance. But there was another refusal to depart a full half an hour after Jack Coyne’s magnificent speech was over. The Mayo fans just didn’t want to say goodbye to the bowl of Croke Park. It was as if they thought they’d lose something of the day’s essence after they stepped away into the darkness of the stadium concourses, like Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams passing up his shot at baseball immortality. My friend Mark Horgan and I knew our old workmate Annette was in the next section over from us in the Lower Hogan and we went looking for her. We had all joined Newstalk at the same time, at the same age, 22, and in Dublin and without a care or a clue. We hugged and hugged, and her daughter Tessa ran off to the side of the pitch to try to get a photo with Kobe.READ MOREAnnette’s dad watched it at home in Kilkelly, a man born on the very day Mayo won the All-Ireland final in 1951. Her husband had watched the game in the Davin Stand and had decamped to the Maldron in a daze. She should go ... but while she could see the pitch, maybe she’d stay a minute longer. Maybe this was as good as it would get. Earlier, the 19-year-old girl in the seat beside Mark had burst into tears the second the hooter went. The couple in their 30s beside me jumped and leapt and screamed and hugged. Ninety seconds later, the girl beside Mark was ecstatic and my two were crying their hearts out on each other’s shoulders. You looked around and everyone was crying, the tears hitting people in waves. Like the celebrations of the players on the pitch, it was just pure joy, completely non-performative. These were people having the best day of their life. Maybe 60,000 of them, all in the same place at the same time.Try to remember the best day of your life – and now imagine sharing that exact feeling with that many people, simultaneously. That’s why it was the greatest sporting occasion I’ll ever attend. I can’t see how anything could beat it.Mark and I eventually drifted away and walked out on to Jones Road. There, people realised the feeling hadn’t gone away just because you couldn’t see the pitch any more. There followed then an anxiety to get to family and friends. Fans outside Croke Park stadium after Mayo beat Kerry in the All-Ireland final. Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA Wire It’s a well-connected person who can sit with three or four family members on All-Ireland final day. For the luckiest, there will be two in the Hogan, one in the Cusack, someone on the Hill maybe. So outside the ground people rushed around on their phones trying to get everyone together.“Stay where you are, I’ll find you.”Photos taken to memorialise the moment. Maybe the feeling would go away when leaving Jones Road, out from under the shadow of the stadium. Best to try and bottle what you can. *** Twenty-four hours later in Castlebar, and that feeling had gone nowhere. I had spent the morning in the team hotel just off Aungier Street, the Sam Maguire given pride of place in the hotel foyer. American tourists had been staring at it and asking questions, curious as to just why people were rushing to this ornament in tears, taking photographs.Mayo fans at the homecoming in Castlebar, Mayo. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho Andy Moran, All-Ireland winning manager, stood there patiently explaining 75 years of hurt. In the afternoon we drove west. After MacHale Park, an evening in the pubs of Castlebar, delaying the drive back to Dublin for as long as we could. My well-lubricated fellow passengers wanted to stop off for some food on our long walk back to the car. We met two gardaí at the end of a long day of overtime who told us they were usually stationed in Sligo but had been reassigned for the festivities. Conversation turned, inevitably, to Kobe. “We saw his auld fellah in Sligo last week, working away. Sure he still looks like he could play.”It was just the sort of myth-building – an interaction at a distance – you’d got used to hearing about Ciarán McDonald. I’d got a little closer to McDonald père that morning in the hotel, for the first time since we interviewed him on RTÉ television 12 years ago.I shook his hand and told him we’d never had a reaction to an interview like it. He nodded shyly and said some nice things. Then I asked him if he fancied a sequel, and he hugged me and politely, warmly, declined. In the days after that programme we were sent a photo of a pub in Achill, taken from behind the bar while the interview was on. There were seven men along the counter, all turned around in their seats to find out just what Ciarán McDonald sounded like, as they’d never heard him speak before. [ ‘The shackles are off’: Colm Boyle says future Mayo teams will benefit from breakthroughOpens in new window ]The whole tableau spoke to the enormity of Mayo as a county, and the enormity of football within it. The enigma of McDonald, the unknowability of him, seemed to sum up the ethereal, complicated nature of the game in the place. There was always something cinematic about Ciarán and Mayo. And now Kobe is eternal. If Mayo had spent the entire 75 years since 1951 doing nothing other than devising the best possible way to end the wait, they couldn’t have come up with a better day than last Sunday. And as the celebrations continue, they are starting to realise that maybe the feeling won’t ever go away.