ON Friday they'll gather to celebrate, or at least be celebrated. Congress 2010 is being held in Down to mark the golden jubilee of their immortal All Ireland breakthrough and to start proceedings they'll be the guests of honour at a function which Mary McAleese will also grace. It's just one of several days out they'll have now on the back of what they did as young men all those years ago and Paddy Doherty for one is looking forward to it. As he says himself, "It's a big year for us."

It would be wrong to say Kevin Mussen is as excited about it. Even though he was the one that went up and collected the cup and said the cúpla focal, he was and remains a rather retiring man. Ach, he enjoys seeing all the boys when they get together, but he'd like to think there's been more to his life than being the first man to bring Sam Maguire over the border back in 1960. He taught for over 40 years. He was married to Josephine for even longer before the cancer took her so quickly six years ago. He has five children, including a daughter who lives in Melbourne and who he goes over to every second Christmas.

"To be honest, I find it mildly embarrassing, all these reunions and functions. I mean, who the hell wants to see all these 70-plus-year-old boys?! Increasingly we mean even less because so many people weren't even born back then. There's been a hell of a lot of people buried that were in Croke Park that day in 1960. We're running out of people who were at it."

He thinks for a moment of his four teammates from that day who have since passed away, the most recent of them Patsy O'Hagan who they buried only last month in Claregalway.

"They're even taking from our pitch now which is a bit alarming!" he timidly laughs from the sitting room of his tidy house in Newcastle. "You really realise your mortality when you see some of the boys start to go."

But that's precisely why Mussen and his team of 1960 have been invited to the Slieve Donard Hotel next Friday. The less people there are around now from that day in 1960 the more they need to be remembered as football had never seen anything quite like them before.

• • •

It's 24 September, 1961, and a year after Mussen has brought Sam over the border, the largest crowd that has ever – and will ever – witness an Irish sporting event is squeezed into Croke Park. A total of 90,556 people have paid in but roughly another 15,000 have broken in, as some of the trampled gates in the old ground can testify. Some of them have come to see Offaly play in their first-ever All Ireland final but most of them have come to see Down.

Down, whose entire half-forward line of O'Neill, McCartan and Doherty are already legendary figures in the mould of Ring and Mackey. Down with those other mobile, finishing forwards of Tony Hadden, Brian 'Breen' Morgan and Patsy O'Hagan. Down, with that alluring, magical combination of red and black. Down, with that even greater combination of teak-tough defending and blitzing, attacking football that frustrated and bamboozled the mighty Kerry.

But early into this game things are looking bad. After 10 minutes Offaly have already scored two goals.

Then George Lavery latches onto a ball at corner-back. He plays it on to Jarlath Carey in midfield who moves it smartly to Paddy Doherty on the wing. Then Doherty launches a high ball into the centre. James McCartan rises to catch it and, according to the chronicler Raymond Smith, then manages to turn in mid-air and boot it into the net before his feet touch the ground.

Up at the back of the Hogan Stand, Cormac 'Hughie' Quinn rises out of his end-of-row seat and starts jumping with joy in the aisle. He notices the man on the last seat of the row opposite has done the same.

Then Seán O'Neill gathers a ball before thumping it into the net, prompting the two strangers dancing in the aisle to embrace.

And then just before half-time, Breen Morgan breezes in for goal number three, giving Down a lead they will not relinquish. As the players make their way to the dressing room, Quinn and his new-found friend catch their breath and introduce themselves. Turns out, right enough, they're fellow countymen. Quinn is a farm labourer and raconteur from Glenties. The other boy is from Gweedore.

That was the grip they had on people all over Ulster and all over Ireland, riveted to Micheál Ó Hehir. Long before Loughnane's Clare or Kidney's Munster, Down crossed over and captured the imagination and hearts of people beyond their own borders like no other Irish sports team before. Only the Wexford hurlers of the Rackards could compare. They were football's first sexy team. They were the first team to belong to someone other than their own.

• • •

What added to their romance was that only a few years earlier there had been nothing sexy about Down football.

"We started from the bottom," says Mussen. "Winning nawthin'. I played for six or seven years without Down winning a [championship] match. It was poorly organised. I wouldn't have known some of the players on the team that turned out for Down in the bad old days. Come championship [day] maybe 20 of us would be told to come and we'd be gathered there, waiting to see what jersey they threw you. Sure we just went out and played and lost."

In 1956 Mussen was one of only two men from Down that started on the Ulster team that won that year's Railway Cup. That night he got talking to Kerry's Paudie Sheehy who he had been marking earlier that day. They had also marked each other when they were teenagers, Mussen playing for an Ulster colleges selection; Sheehy, for the Munster colleges. From that a friendship had struck up to the point Mussen would even date Sheehy's sister, Noreen, for a while. But still, that night Sheehy told Mussen, "It must be terrible to play for a county that will never win anything." Mussen wasn't the least bit offended. "I would quite have agreed with him at the time."

It was that very year though that things began to change with the appointment of a young school teacher called Maurice Hayes as county secretary. "Hayes brought vision, order," says Mussen. "And when it became organised it became much more fun for us."

The vision was to win an All Ireland by 1961, even though the county hadn't even won an Ulster title before he assumed his post. Hayes' mother was from Kerry and it was from there he would pick up many of his ideas. He saw how in Kerry they had divisional teams and from that he came up with the idea of a barony league. Instead of the whole county board picking the county team, it would be the remit of just four men.

In '56 Hayes would travel to America with Kerry and Dublin and befriend Kerry's brilliant trainer, Dr Eamonn O'Sullivan, picking up the virtues of training. Back then that was a pretty radical concept. Training was something only for counties like Cavan, Kerry and Mayo, and even those counties would cram all their work into the week or two leading up to a provincial or All Ireland final. Down were the first team to train in February, three times a week, doing stamina work and circuit training in Banbridge under Danny Flynn.

"We'd bond alright," says Mussen, "having a cup of tea and a smoke after training. By God a lot of us smoked, including me. Sure with my club, Clonduff, the trainer would have brought a pack of cigarettes and broken them in half to give to you at half-time! That would help your recovery, wouldn't it?!"

But bond they did. There was a potential class divide in that Down dressing room.

Pat Rice was a labourer. Eddie McKay was a mechanic. Paddy Doherty and George Lavery were bricklayers; John Smith, who played on the '61 team, too.

Mussen, Jarlath Carey and Joe Lennon were all school teachers. Sean O'Neill was studying law in Queen's. The McCartans would have come from a big farm and a successful pub and quarry business and like a lot of the team, gone to St Colman's College in Newry. But Paddy would make light of that class distinction – "I'd tell them I went to a high school too; Ballykinlar was up on a hill" – and so would they all.

But even with the unity and order Hayes brought, it took time to truly believe. In 1958 the county reached only their second-ever Ulster final only to lose well to Derry. A year later they were back in another Ulster final. "I presumed Cavan would beat us," says Mussen, "so much so my best friend was there with my bag in his car, ready to drive us to Galway on our holidays." Instead Down hammered Cavan, 2-16 to 0-7 and Mussen had to forget about his holidays. And while Down would lose well to Galway in the All Ireland semi-final, it was partly because the shock of hammering Cavan hadn't dawned on them. When it did, says Hayes, "it was like Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile."

The following year they would win everything – the league, Ulster, All Ireland. By then Mussen knew they had a forward line like no other in the history of football. Seán O'Neill was only 19 in '59 and would develop an incredible telepathy with Doherty, both from play and frees. When it came to frees, their understanding was simple – "Seán took them on the left," says Doherty, "but any handy ones from the middle and the right, I took 'em."

The telepathy all the forwards shared was instinctive. It wasn't something designed in training or on a blackboard; all those runs on and off the ball, all those short passes and return passes, were just something they saw that was on. Barney Carr may have been the first football man to go by the title of 'manager' but his role was to get out of the way and let the forwards play. As Doherty says, "We were an easy team to manage. It's the bad teams that are hard to manage."

With five minutes still to go in that 1960 All Ireland Paudie Sheehy conceded to Mussen the cup was his. And that night, just four years after predicting Down would win nothing, Sheehy would have the grace to call out to the Down banquet and give a speech there.

Mussen would spend the whole next day and a good bit of the following one too giving speeches and going around with the cup. "It was three in the morning before we got back to Newcastle. It was cruel. Meath put on two functions either side of the Boyne. Louth had a reception in Dundalk."

As for that historic crossing of the border, it was just mayhem. "If Hayes was there," he says, "he'd have sorted it out" but Hayes wasn't; he was down in Listowel for the races with James McCartan. But in the end Mussen and Sam made their way through 40,000 people and the customs man. "He said, 'Nice cup. Hold on to it now.'" And they would. The following year Doherty would lift it as well to the delight of two Donegal men in the Hogan and countless of thousands of others.

Mussen would finish up the year after that. Doherty would be one of four players from '60 that would still be around for the victory of '68. "I was 34 then. One of the Kerry boys had told the papers that Paddy Doherty was over the hill. After the game says I, 'There's no hills in Croke Park.'"

They would all make it to their 60s but they've lost four of the starters from that day in Croker. The first of them to go was Breen Morgan, their Brian Dooher to the Canavan that was O'Neill and Doherty. "God, Breen was a tough nut," smiles Mussen. "For a small fella he was up and down like an Indian rubber ball."

In 2005 they lost Pat Rice, their left corner back and a neighbour of Doherty's. "Pat was a gentleman, on and off the field," says Doherty. "That year I was working on the scaffolding, trying to make a few shillings to go to Cheltenham. I stepped on a plank and I went up in the air and I landed on a block. At the same time Pat was lying up in his own house, dying, but he walked down from there to here to see how my back was when he wasn't fit to do it."

The cancer took a good friend of Mussen's too in Jarlath Carey. They'd play golf together, both locally and then down the country to coincide with the Munster hurling final that they'd try to get in every year. Just last month they lost Patsy O'Hagan, along with Lennon, the most versatile player they had. It brought a tear to all their eyes, including Mussen, who taught O'Hagan for a few weeks when he was starting out training as a teacher.

But in the mourning there was something of a celebration too. Hayes, one of the architects of the peace process, gave a wonderful eulogy. James McCartan was still hopping balls and Doherty was still kicking them with that beautiful, childish confidence of his.

Taking it all in was Mussen. Sometimes laughing, sometimes mournful, always proud. "We've had no fallings out. They were as fine a bunch of fellas as I ever came across. Having played with them, I would recommend a team sport first to any child. I have a grandson who is mad keen on golf and I'm a bit annoyed with him; he doesn't want to play anything else. In football you learn to deal and live with your fellow man. You grow. You see others grow. If it wasn't for football Paddy Doherty would probably have just been another wee quiet retired bricklayer, without a word to say to the world. But he blossomed. He absolutely blossomed and it was beautiful to see."

Just like it was seeing them play football. As Patsy reminded them last month, as men they're only mortal after all. But Raymond Smith with the title of his book all those years ago wasn't wrong. When it comes to the game itself they'll always be football immortals.

kshannon@tribune.ie