CAUGHT IN THE jet stream of the 24-hour news cycle, wherein countries seem to decide afresh whether they are at war with each other at the start of each new day, it is too easy to move on too quickly from many stories that matter. 

Yes, it’s been nearly six days now, but it would be a mistake to forget the earth-shaking lesson of last Sunday. That lesson being: wait a second, curses are real?

When young Jack Coyne led Mayo to their first Senior Men’s All-Ireland Football final victory in three-score and 15 years, it closed the book on one of the most statistically improbable trophy droughts in the history of the sport (or perhaps, indeed, in any sport — imagine a tennis player losing 13 Grand Slam finals without ever winning one?). And as with many of the other droughts that the world is facing right now, this one, too, was manmade. 

Some people have extremely incorrectly offered the take that Mayo ‘broke the curse’ when they won last weekend. That is the absolute opposite of what happened, and the worst lesson we could possibly take from Mayo’s win. The curse did exactly what it said it was going to do. The curse was not broken; it was fulfilled. 

The story of Mayo’s 75-year wait to be reunited with the Sam Maguire deserves to be studied closely, seeing as how it’s probably the best chance we’ll ever have to understand the rules of how curses work. 

The curse began in 1951, after Mayo won their last All-Ireland Final. Apocryphal or not, the story goes that as the team made their way back to Mayo, they passed through the village of Foxford, where their celebrations in some way interrupted a........

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