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Just before I was about to hit send on last week's column I deleted one of the opening lines 'Beware- this game is fraught with danger'.

They ‘will rank in history amongst the greatest teams that have contested the Championship’, so read the report of a contemporary journalist after witnessing Mayo rout Laois in the 1936 All-Ireland Football Final and claim the county’s first senior football championship. Mayo senior football was peaking that year. The planets had begun their alignment four years earlier when Mayo contested only their third All-Ireland final. A narrow loss to Kerry in 1932 was crushing but oil had been struck and it did not just flow, it gushed throughout the 1930s and Mayo fans bathed in it. The 1932 final was the incendiary event that sparked an era of magnificence in Mayo football. The green and red would eventually see out the decade with a record six consecutive National Football League titles won between 1934 and 1939. With three of the six NFL crowns secured by the first game of Mayo’s championship campaign in May 1936, the aligning planets must have appeared as leather footballs to the success-spoiled county.