While many will want to see Mayo win the All-Ireland on Sunday, there's a feeling among some that, were Mayo to win, we'll have somehow lost what Mayo bring to the GAA. Their nigh-existential pursuit of an All-Ireland title somehow seems to validate the entire All-Ireland series: that if one county wants the prize that badly, then it must surely be worth winning.
Their longing is manic: in the aftermath of the defeat to Dublin in 2013, the county board chairman roared stoically "America got Bin Laden, Mayo will get Sam Maguire!".
Also, Mayo winning an All-Ireland would mean we wouldn't be able to ask The Question before the beginning of every Championship season, potentially trimming a couple of pages off the Championship previews every May.
In defeat, Mayo seem to make everyone else's success worthwhile.
So were Mayo to actually go and do it, and fulfill the morally questionable prophecy of their chairman four years ago, it would be as close to Y2K as football punditry is likely to stray. It's a daunting prospect.
I'm likely not in a minority here, and perhaps it is the latent Catholic in me, but I'd like to see Mayo finally do it this weekend. For Mayo's pursuit of Sam is an essentially Catholic condition: the willful subjugation to hardship and pain in pursuit of something that may never come.
Objectively, they probably won't: Dublin are a better team with better players more practised in the art of success. It's not as if Dublin have shown many chinks in their armour: they treated the Leinster football championship with the collective shrug of a shoulder it deserved, and were hauntingly comfortable against Monaghan and Tyrone.
Mayo, for their part, stumbled and fell in the Connacht Championship, and they did not exactly storm their way through the qualifiers.
Not that Mayo will be lacking hope - the All-Ireland project is founded upon it - and if they look hard enough they'll find it: perhaps Dublin are undercooked?
They will also cling to the nebulous truth that nothing can be taken as guaranteed on All-Ireland final day.
Those comfortable with Mayo winning it out will say, that after 65 years, Mayo deserve an All-Ireland. Others will say that deserve ain't got anything to do with it.
Perhaps it's the idea of historical merit that appeals to my sympathies, or maybe I just can't bear the thought of Alan Dillon losing an eighth All-Ireland final, or see the old dog Andy Moran forced to take the high road without a Celtic Cross in hand.
There's also the nagging feeling that Dublin will have plenty more All-Irelands down the line: they now occupy the position of being default champions every year, with it being left to another county to win it to prevent them from collecting it.
I don't know whether an All-Ireland win would mean more to the Mayo players and fans than it would to Dublin.
But it would end the GAA's greatest period of longing, and, as Delillo tells us, longing on such a large scale is what makes history.
Were Dublin to win this weekend, it would further validate everything they have done in preparing for the future.
Were Mayo to win, it would justify a larger history.
See Also: Balls Remembers: Complete Modern History Of The Increasingly Bitter Dublin-Mayo Rivalry
