In late September, St Barnabas GAA club achieved a remarkable feat: With a starting team comprised solely of American-born players, they defeated Sligo in the New York Senior Football Championship final.
For St Barnabas, it was an opposition team which featured Sligo inter-county player Niall Murphy, Galway's Peter Cooke and 2017 All-Ireland winning Galway hurler Johnny Glynn.
"It was a great day for us, a great day for home-grown Irish American players," Mike Brosnan, the St Barnabas chairman, told Radio Kerry's Terrace Talk.
"It was a great day for New York GAA.
"We knew we had a good bunch of players coming up with the last few years. They're no strangers to success, and they've had success over in Ireland as well. They're no strangers to the big day.
"They stuck with it. We had a couple of tough years at senior level, getting our behinds handed to us."
The Covid-19 pandemic undoubtedly helped St Barnabas. Usually, New York clubs' numbers swell during the summer with Irish players transferring across the water. That didn't happen this year.
"We knew this year with Covid and the lack of sanctions and that coming out from Ireland that we had a huge shot at it," said Brosnan, a Kerry native.
"We hope to build on this. We know there were no sanctions out this year, but we try to stay away from that as much as possible. We believe in the players we have here. A lot of work has gone into developing them.
"There's big work being done by the [New York] county board in developing Irish Americans. The minor board has done trojan work down the years to get these players to where they are now."
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