When Sean O’Shea’s dramatic late free split the posts in the All-Ireland semi-final, it was the first time since 2010 that Dublin had lost a Championship game by a single point.
The previous occasion was another All-Ireland semi-final, as Cork pipped them 12 years ago en route to their only title since 1990 in what was Mick Fitzsimons’ first year on the team.
But the team was on an upward gradient. A little over a year later he had the first of his eight All-Ireland medals courtesy of a one-point victory over Kerry and in subsequent seasons Mayo were repeatedly on the wrong side of the odd point against Dublin, losing All-Ireland finals to them in 2013, ‘16 (replay) and ‘17 by the bare minimum.
So, the recent Kerry defeat gave Mick Fitzsimons, who had limped off injured when O’Shea made his late intervention, a fresh insight into the kind of heartache that those losses can visit having so often fallen on the other side of those results.
And it brought some soul-searching as to what he could or should have done differently over the course of the game that might have tipped the scales the other way.
“One hundred percent,” he says. “As you get more experienced you don’t dwell on it and you hope other lads don’t dwell on it and that’s why you chat to lads after games who were involved in anything big because there are so many little things.
“It will always be amplified if it comes towards the end of a game, what happened, but there are loads of little moments earlier in the game that will have a similar impact.
“If I don’t go forward and I stay back, am I in a better position to defend a counter? So I can look back on those little things I did.
“Again, you just try and prepare well and trust in what you do. There’s no point in ruminating over it for three months, you just think ‘If I ever get the chance to do it again, what will I do next time?’
“So there are so many little moments. Like you think of Mayo and all those games they’ve played against us, they have obviously beaten us since then and fair play to them. But back then it was so tough on them, those tiny moments.
“You don’t think of that when you win a game, it just completely papers over the cracks of those little things ‘oh I failed there’ or ‘that could have cost us’ - it’s just a fleeting thought.
“As you get more experienced you don’t dwell on them but some might dwell on them for a while and you have in the past, maybe.”
Although Dublin lasted until the penultimate stage of the Championship, the new split season model meant that it was their earliest exit since 2003, when Armagh beat them in a third round qualifier on the first weekend in July.
And while a run with Cuala to the Dublin quarter-finals kept him occupied, the fact that each of the county team’s last two seasons have ended unusually early has seen him become creative with how he fills the extra time.
This year he’s indulged in a bit of five aside soccer; last year it was jiu jitsu with the Dublin lads.
“It was something different and it keeps you fresh. When you’re playing football it’s like anything, it’s the exercise or the same thing over and over again you can get a little bit burnt out with it. But when you play a different sport or a different activity it gives you a different perspective and you can bring something back to football.
“We did that last year, this year I have done a bit of five aside but we are playing Ballinteer in a (league) play-off. We have to play them and the loser goes into a relegation play-off against Mearnog so we are back training with Cuala so there wasn’t that much of a break.”
Somewhat surprisingly, there have been no retirements from the Dublin team since the Kerry loss and manager Dessie Farrell has signed on for another two years while coaxing Jack McCaffrey and Paul Mannion back into the panel for 2023.
It all suggests that their stable of veterans, of which 33-year-old Fitzsimons is one, will give it another whirl next year but those loose ends with Cuala give him enough wriggle room to avoid a straight answer to whether he will commit for a 14th season.
“You don’t look too far ahead. Every season I’d wait until the club is finished and you chat to whoever and you think about it. That’s just the way.”
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