those high, wayward, missthe-netting-behind-the-goals wides . . . and thought to himself that there was every reason to suspect a Mayo collapse? Was he, above all, pondering to himself quite what a reception his name would have gotten at the next Mayo County Board meeting if it was him down on the sideline and not John O'Mahony? It's hard not to think he'd have been entitled.

To the outsider, the vitriol directed towards Moran and John Morrison in those dog days last October seemed small and petty even by the standards of your average collection of delegates in any part of the country. If memory serves, there was at least one sane voice in the wilderness who stood during the heated post All Ireland final county board meeting and asked, not unreasonably, if it was not the case that many in the room would have been more than happy at the start of the year of offered a league semi-final, a Connacht title and an All Ireland final appearance. He was alone, though. Alone and shouted down.

There'll hardly be any of that this year, but that probably has more do with John O'Mahony being one of their own rather than a general acceptance of another double-digit exit from the championship. Already, the talk is of transition and replenishment, with O'Mahony . . . in public at least . . . hoping that the usual candidates for retirement take some time with their decision. But no matter who stays and who goes, maybe the biggest change that should be wrought is a resetting of where the people of Mayo see their place in the general footballing scheme of things.

Because what this year and last year and the two before that have done is pretty much prove the sane voice at the county board meeting last October right. Of course, getting a toasting in an All Ireland final isn't fun, but it's not like at the start of the year with everybody in the county making sure to keep the third weekend in September free. The truth of it is that, far from being the louche under-achievers of lazy repute, two All Ireland finals in three years should be a feat to be proud of in Mayo.

If anything, these are overachievers.

Colm Coyle has a lot to answer for, of course. If he'd just kicked that last-minute Hail Mary in the 1996 drawn final a little harder so that it dropped into John Madden's hands instead of hopping over the bar, then Mayo folk would have their All Ireland.

Instead, there's a bereft feeling and instead of hailing the accomplishment of three more final appearances in the following decade . . . a record Kerry alone can beat . . . loud and long is the wailing and gnashing of teeth when it all unravels as it tends to do.

Those are some high standards for a county that can't exactly say it lays claim to hands-down the best playing talent of the past decade. A county without a proper fullback in all that time. Nor fullforward, for that matter. A county that has had to make do, at different times and for different reasons, without Ciaran McDonald and David Brady and Trevor Mortimer.

A county with only one dual All Star . . . James Nallen in the current squad. And yet, as Kevin McStay has pointed out in the past, the people of Mayo somehow made their side favourites going into the 1997 and 2004 All Ireland finals. But any bit of hindsight, if allied to honesty, will tell you there wasn't an All Ireland in that team.

There's been a lot of talk of a clear-out since last Saturday, with wild estimates of anything up to a dozen players either retiring or being retired. Indeed, O'Mahony made reference during the aftermath to programmes and structures that had been put in place since last October for players who weren't on the current panel in the hope that they'd be ready for next year. Everything smacked of a year that had been written off after the Galway game.

How else to explain that wholesale changes in personnel between a more than decent league campaign and the championship? The starting defence in the league final against Donegal read Liam O'Malley, James Kilcullen, Keith Higgins, Enda Devenney, Billy Joe Padden and Peadar Gardiner. Last Saturday, only O'Malley remained and even then he'd been moved to full-back.

"Derry are further on in their development curve than we are and that showed, " O'Mahony said last week.

He's been around too long and achieved too much at this stage for his words to be dismissed as the weasel excuses of a losing manager. So when he says that last year's beaten All Ireland finalists are further back than a team like Derry who will, at best, make an All Ireland semi-final, it has to be viewed as a sensible and honest appraisal of where Mayo find themselves.

"It's very obvious that the transitional period has started in Mayo football. That was always going to happen. I think it's a great time of opportunity in Mayo football for players to come forth and come into the squad. That doesn't mean that I want everybody else to retire or anything else."

Mayo did phenomenally well to make last year's All Ireland final. Ditto 2004.

O'Mahony knows that and knows as well how far there is to go if they're ever to get back to that point. Mickey Moran knew it too. For others, it might take a while to