The car journey takes him past no-name towns and soulless business parks.
Three times a week he makes it, leaving his house at 2pm, getting home at midnight, Crossmaglen to Rathdrum, Armagh to Wicklow, two hours door to door if he’s lucky, four hours if he’s not.
Driving allows him time to think. If you spend 60 days travelling 12,000 miles through five counties, the heartland will reveal its secrets, the sight of football posts in places as diverse as Crossmaglen, Ballymun, Greystones, Rathdrum.
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Small communities and big dreams. Football at the centre of them.
Is that why Oisin McConville does it? Is that what keeps him going as the sky darkens and the clock ticks past 11 when there is no one to phone because no one will pick up.
Is that why he left his home for a game in Waterford last Sunday morning at 6.30am and didn’t get back until 8.30?
Is that why he had a quick bite to eat, a catch-up with the family, a bedtime story for his children and then, when mere mortals would be thinking about hitting the hay, he scrolled through a couple of hours of videotape?
The answer stems from who he is and where he is from. All the McConvilles were football people, Cross a football town. Everything shut there on a Sunday so if you didn’t have sport then you didn’t do much until Monday came along.
The majority of his time was spent in the field, first as a player who was good enough to win an All-Ireland with Armagh, plus 17 county titles, 10 Ulsters and six All-Ireland club championships with Cross.
Next came management, at collegiate level with Dundalk, then with various clubs, Cross in Armagh, Seneschalstown in Meath, Iniskeen in Monaghan.
“I enjoyed working with players and seeing what impact I could have with them," Oisin McConville says. "That made me want to have a crack at inter-county level.”
Wicklow called before in 2019/20. But as a father of three with a one-year-old child, the timing was not right. “I kept an eye on it not knowing if the opportunity would come again.”
It did. “It was a good fit for me because they hadn’t scratched the surface of their potential, and the indicators were there that good players were coming through at minor and Under 20 level, and they were a team who could improve. That gave me the opportunity to work with something.”
But that’s only half the reason.
This management game is deeply personal to those who try it.
Some players can walk away from the sport when their legs slow and their body creak. Others can’t.
The addiction isn’t just winning, it’s the need to have football as part of their routine. Deeper than that, it’s the desire to be tested, to question yourself and then defeat those doubts.
“Everyone is looking for balance in their life,” McConville said. “If I was a multinational company, you would say we were restructuring. I felt I was being pulled in ten different directions so I wanted to focus on just three things.”
Work and family were parts one and two of that trilogy, managing Wicklow the third element.
It is an adrenaline rush. Mondays and Tuesdays are intense, scrolling through tape, analysing the previous game, prepping for the next.
Some managers are at their worst then, others at the best, energised by the pressure, conscious of the need to inspire others.
“I didn’t realise until I went into inter-county management that your energy levels have to be high all the time. After a couple of months on the job, I concentrated a lot on what I was doing for myself, so there was a bit of self-care as far as diet was concerned.
“When you are on the road all the time you have a tendency to eat crap all the time. That was the case before Christmas. After New Year, I completely changed my diet, started eating more healthily, exercising more, so that I could get the energy levels up and transfer that across to the players.
“On match day I am pretty narky on the line if I am being honest about that. I am trying to improve that and to keep an eye on other things. That has proven difficult for me because I am an emotional individual.
“I can be quite fiery at times so I am trying to temper that. Of all the things that is the one I can see where I need some self-improvement. Definitely I need to calm down a little bit.”
You put it to him that calmness is an overrated quality, normally the preserve of people who don’t have a soul.
He laughs.
“I can never see myself being that stoic figure on the sideline but there is probably a bit of balance between where I am and where I need to be.
"Genuinely I am probably at my most composed when the whistle goes and the ball is thrown in.
“The influence managers can have on a game is probably over egged that little bit. The result is really down to players and their attitude. You can have a semblance of influence (as a manager) but maybe not as much as we think we have.”
Yet perhaps he is doing himself a disservice here because this evening he will take his Wicklow team to Croke Park for the Division Four final against Sligo, the same stadium where he had his greatest hour, scoring the decisive goal in Armagh’s All-Ireland win over Kerry.
Five times he has been there when the place was packed, when the roars for a score can be heard in neighbouring postcodes. Tonight, the size of the crowd will be comparatively tiny.
“The stadium not being full is not ideal but this is an opportunity that is not going to arrive at our door every year. So you have to embrace it.
“These guys are used to playing in front of small crowds (ranging from 500 to 2,000 people), so they will be playing in front of more people than they have done all year.
“These guys are excited by the prospect and they should be. This is the biggest game they have played in quite some time and you want to see how they respond to that.”
For McConville, today's Division Four final is as big as 2002, which may seem ridiculous to any of us who have never managed at this level, but which makes perfect sense for those who did. For, you delve deep into yourself when you take charge of a team. Every decision brings responsibility.
“I know how things operate because I have been on the other side of the TV cameras so I know Division Four is a blip on the radar for the majority of people.
“But when you are there in the middle of it, it doesn’t feel that you are in any way inferior or down the pecking order. There are certain things that happen within the context of that, that do make you realise we are not the most important thing or the only show in town.”
Such as?
“I am not going to go too deep ... but I suppose we can be guinea pigs sometimes with regards to officials and certain things that go on around fixtures.
"You feel as if you are being treated a little bit differently but look, I made peace with it before I got the job.”
That’s why today’s Division Four final equates to the 2002 All-Ireland. Not to everyone else, for sure, but for him, most definitely. Back then he was just a cog, albeit an important one, in the wheel. Now he is the one steering that wheel.
“This is living,” Jim McGuinness once said of inter county management.
It certainly is life Jim, but not as he knew it.
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