For Down boss Conor Laverty, the euphoria of Sunday's stunning 3-21 to 1-21 Ulster Championship quarter-final win over back-to-back champions Donegal was made even sweeter by the heartache endured along the way.
Since being appointed in 2022, Laverty has experienced his fair share of highs and lows in charge of his native county. He still remembers what he calls the "worst bus journey of my life" when his team's transport struggled to find the way home after a 10-point defeat by Armagh in the Ulster semi-final at a rain-lashed Clones in 2023.
More recently, he struggled to shake the strange feeling of dejection that washed over him after his side's sub-par second-half performance in the Division Three final against Wexford, which they went on to win in extra-time.
Laverty was determined to ensure Down's trip to Letterkenny to take on a heavily fancied Donegal outfit—who thrashed Kerry in the Division One decider—ended with a different feeling.
"The big challenge to the players was that we felt that over this past number of years that we've been close to a marquee win against Armagh and Donegal," explained the Kilcoo club-man. "But just in moments, even like last year, whenever we had the opportunities near the end of the game, we didn't take them, but today I felt the lads really stood up."
Toppling Donegal took meticulous preparation. Laverty had planned for the holders' influential forward Michael Langan's absence—which the Down camp got wind of during the week—and drilled his players on how to stop the Donegal attack.
"We looked at Donegal and we worked on it and we studied them in great detail, particularly their forward play," explained Laverty. "But we concentrated on ourselves an awful lot. I think we approached this game in a different manner than we approached last year and how we approached Armagh in the previous campaign, albeit it's a different game now."
"We probably felt last year we came with a more frustration game to Donegal and trying to bring them down the straight. But the plan today was to get up and to get at it nice and early and really test them and express ourselves. The word we've used all week is belief."
To steel his players for a top-level championship test, Laverty took them as far as Killarney for a challenge game against Kerry. As Laverty explained, the Kingdom "don't play too many challenge matches," but when the opportunity arose, he was keen to thrust his players into a tussle with a championship juggernaut.
"It worked for the [Down under] 20s in my first year. We played Kerry, we played Dublin, we played the best teams in the country," he said. "If we're going to play Donegal today, and I can say to these lads, after 35 or odd minutes in a game, that we're doing and executing things that we want to do...."