Up until 5.10pm on Sunday evening, Jason McGahan had a rather bittersweet claim to fame.
When the Athletic Grounds was first opened after being redeveloped, he kicked the first point at the Armagh City venue in a Junior Football Championship semi-final in 2008.
A former county minor, he was approaching the end of his playing career with O’Connell’s Tullysaran, who were still seeking an elusive first Junior title at the time.
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Unfortunately for McGahan and Tullysaran, they lost the semi-final to local rivals the Grange and would also lose the 2010 final to the same opposition.
By then, McGahan was a player and a coach with O’Connell’s having already spent several years working with various underage teams at the club.
A series of painful near-misses only served to add fuel to McGahan’s burning ambition to be successful. He told his teammates he dreamed of climbing the steps of the Hogan Stand one day. If he couldn’t do it with his club, he was sure he’d do it some day as a coach.
As Kerry’s Head of Athletic Development, he fulfilled a lifelong goal and got his hands on the Sam Maguire Cup on Sunday at Croke Park.
“I'm still trying to take it in,” stated McGahan after Kerry’s four-point victory over Galway.
“That’s my 30th All-Ireland – my first was in 1986 and my father took me to watch Kerry and Tyrone.
“I had a Kerry headband on and I was in the Canal End. I watched Kerry go seven points down and come back to win by eight. I told the story to the boys on Monday that this is my 30th All-Ireland.
“After ’86 I knew what I wanted to do, I wanted to walk the steps of the Hogan Stand, and I did that.
“It's a long, long time, a goal of mine to do that. To come from Tullysaran . . . I told the boys in Tullysaran back in 2010, we were going to the county final and I said my one goal in life was to walk the steps of the Hogan Stand, wouldn’t it be great to do it with the club?
"We didn’t get over the line that day, but now, 12 years later, I've walked the steps of the Hogan Stand. I just can't really put into words, it's just so unreal. It's unreal.”
It’s quite the journey from Tullysaran to Tralee and it is another 10 miles more to Kerry's Centre of Excellence at Currans where McGahan is based and his coaching career has seen him work with Tyrone side Carrickmore and Armagh City club Pearse Og’s.
Yet, his induction to the inter-county scene came as a result of his friendship with Cian O’Neill.
The pair met when McGahan was studying for his PHD at Cork IT, where O’Neill is the Head of Sport, Leisure and Childhood Studies.
O’Neill brought McGahan into the Kerry set-up when he was part of Eamonn Fitzmaurice’s backroom team in 2015.
When O’Neill was offered the job with his native Kildare at the end of 2015, the Armagh man went with him out of a sense of loyalty, despite the fact that Kerry wanted McGahan to stay on.
He remained on the Kingdom’s radar for the next number of seasons and, late in 2018, they made him their first full-time Head of Athletic Development - overseeing strength and conditioning work of Kerry’s football teams from development level up to senior.
As fate would have it, O’Neill was in the opposition dressing room last Sunday as part of Pádraic Joyce’s coaching set-up.
“My career, I thought to myself, I’m not going to do this as a player, so I'm gonna have to start looking at coaching and I went into coaching,” reflected McGahan.
“I was always into coaching but my career as a footballer was starting to go away from me, I felt as if I wasn't going to happen for me as a player. So I just started trying to make things happen for myself. Jeez, cliché as it is, dreams do come true.
“There's a lot of people I have to thank that give me opportunities throughout my career, even with coaching my own club, as a player-manager, to coaching Pearse Og’s, coaching Carrickmore with Adrian Clarke and the boys.
“Eventually then, actually it was Cian O’Neill who gave me my break. Cian, obviously he's in the (Galway) changing rooms there, I'd have to thank him for everything, he gave me the opportunity to be working with Kerry in 2015. I'm grateful for everything.”
Sunday was a proud moment for McGahan, but he wasn’t the only Tullysaran native in the Kerry camp.
Colin Trainor was brought in last year in what proved to be Peter Keane’s last season in charge of the Kingdom.
When Jack O’Connor came in for his third tenure, he retained the services of stats guru Trainor who, as well as being the financial director of CDE Global, worked with Armagh Ladies in recent years.
With Tyrone man Paddy Tally also in O'Connor's management team, Ulster had quite the influence on Kerry's success.
“Last year I was doing a bit of coaching myself, some s&c with Peter (Keane) and Tommy (Griffin) and the boys, and I said I know a good stats man who could help me and I asked him would he be interested,” revealed McGahan.
“He (Trainor) helped me a couple of times before and eventually I got him in. Peter met him, then I got him to meet Jack (O’Connor) and Paddy (Tally), and Paddy thought the world of him.
“We got Colin in, it was great to get him in, he’s a great man.”
Few people outside of county Armagh even know where Tullysaran is. Close to the village of Benburb, but on the Armagh side of the river Blackwater, it is a place more renowned for producing All-Ireland champions in road bowling.
A small rural hamlet in Mid-Ulster with no shops and no longer with a pub, Tullysaran can proudly boast that two of their own helped Kerry claim Sam Maguire in 2022.
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