Gavan Reilly: For those of us on the stands and sidelines, it has been a cathartic journey

It would be amiss not to at least devote some of this week’s column space to the exploits of Robbie Brennan and his band of Royal warriors.

No doubt the margin of defeat on Sunday will sting for a while longer for them, than for the rest of us who followed them on the giddy journey back to the hot, thin air of the late summer.

For those of us on the stands and sidelines, it has been a cathartic journey.

Those of us who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s simply assumed this was our birthright; that we would be there-or-thereabouts every year.

When that’s the experience of childhood, adulthood hits you like a brick to the face.

I hope the players aren’t too demoralised by the scoreline against Donegal.

Play the same fixture a hundred times and you’d struggle to find another one where so many marginal things went against our men.

For this year, either it’s Donegal, which tells us we were beaten by the best, or it’s Kerry – lifting Sam in July after chasing our shadows in Tullamore in June.

Either is a good outcome.

And for next year, let’s fill Navan for every League match, and propel our boys on from there.