Home are the Heroes

Followers of the heroic Brosna All-Ireland Junior Club Football Championship winning team may have been hoarse and teary in Croke Park on Saturday evening after their great win. However,  they were loud and cheery and back in Brosna on Sunday evening and as madly enthusiastic as ever in spite of the persistent rain.

There they settled in for the long wait as the team bus crawled its way through the thronged main street and onto the Sportsfield. It’s there, after all, that the whole journey started at various periods of time for this now historic unit of local heroes.

Manager, Jimmy Keane put it all in a sentence on Sunday night when he said that all the sweat they  had left above in that field was worth every drop for seeing the sea of jubilant faces before them now.

“Didn’t I tell ye we’d win it,” said manager Keane as he was asked to sum it all up after being introduced on the ‘gig-rig’ in The Square by MC Tim Moynihan. The crowd, hoarsened by the Croke Park battle a little more than 24 hours previously, roared its appreciation for the effort and its approval for the result.

Strains of the Cullen Pipe Band set the feet a-marching at ten minutes to 7pm and the team reached the stage 20 minutes later.

A torchlit procession led the players down from ‘The Field’ to The Square. Pikes which have seen better days will see no bigger that this.  There were two four-pronged, a three and a two used to impale the paraffin soaked sods of turf to guide the players on the most anticipated and joyful couple of hundred yards they’re ever likely to walk. They didn’t walk alone and there were family members, friends, neighbours and flag waving fans every step of the way down the hill to the bonfire lit village square.

Most of the players, realising the historic implications of their great achievement and delighted at the response-in-the-rain, recorded the parade and the crowd on smart phones. Retired garda and Brosna native, George Daly was there in the thick of it too with his video-camera as was Castleisland’s Paudie Herlihy. There will be no shortage of footage of this great event.

There will be victory celebrations, T-shirts, jerseys, caps, new mugs and other symbols of making hay while the sun shines to mark this great occasion. Oh, and new pikes.