‘The main attraction ... is the opportunity to play in Croke Park’ – Andy Moran on why the Division 4 final matters

But this Saturday comes a first – his maiden voyage to GAA headquarters as manager, two-and-a-half seasons into his Leitrim adventure.

He may have played countless times in Croker – including six All-Ireland SFC finals alone in 2004, ’06, ’13, the ’16 draw and replay, and ’17 – but that’s more times than Leitrim have lined out there. Ever.

Last Sunday, by dint of beating Tipperary and Longford losing to Wexford, the Connacht minnows secured promotion to Division 3 of the Allianz Football League. With that came the beguiling bonus of a Division 4 league decider against Laois this Saturday.

An increasingly crowded inter-county calendar has prompted some high-profile figures to advocate for the scrapping of the NFL finals, with titles decided by league table placings instead.

Moran is not one of them. “To be honest, it has been amazing,” he said of Leitrim’s uplifting spring at the Connacht Championship launch in Bekan.

“Leitrim have played in Croke Park five times in their history, this will be the sixth time that they have played.

“I’ve heard a lot of talk over the last couple of weeks about cutting league finals, but the main attraction for a manager like me – or anyone with a smaller county – is the opportunity to play a final in Croke Park. It is huge.

“That was our target at the start of the year; we are there now. The people of Leitrim are really getting in behind it, and it is exciting for the whole county. I’ve played there multiple times, but I’m as excited now as I ever have been.”

Needless to say, the 2017 Footballer of the Year will be hoping for a different outcome to the previous five Leitrim visits to Croker – they lost a league semi-final to Derry in 1959, an All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin in 1994, a league game against the Dubs the following year, the 2006 Tommy Murphy Cup final against Louth, and another Division 4 decider against Derry in 2019.

Whatever the outcome against Laois, however, it has already been a hugely positive league for Leitrim, who will have no time to rest on their laurels before hosting Sligo in the Connacht SFC quarter-finals the following Sunday.

“If you want to come to watch exciting football with turnovers in it, excitement, catches – every bit of skill in it – Division 4 is great to watch,” Moran pointed out.

“You have a team like Wexford, who have won their last four games by more than 40 points, a really exciting team, a team that could really do something, I think, in the very near future. For us to finish ahead of them is a huge achievement. You cannot underestimate it.

“For the last two years, we got to eight points twice, we won four games twice, we were always saying if we could win that fifth game, we’d get over the line.”

Now in his third season of management, the two-time All-Star described it as a huge education. “You have this fascination with tactics, how you’re going to set up your team,” he reflected. “You’d often look back at the way James (Horan) set up a team or Stephen (Rochford) or Pat (Holmes) or Johnno (John O’Mahony). You’d look at things and think I’d have done this differently.

“When you’re this side of the fence and see all of the stuff that has to go into it, away from football itself, it is huge.

“What I always say is that to do it, you have to love it. It has to be a passion. You couldn’t do it if you’re half in or half out. You have to be all in. Luckily for me, I’ve a very supportive wife in Jennifer. She gives me all the latitude to go to do it.

“I love being involved in a team, being around a group, that helps it. You need that love for it when you’re going through the bad days as we have done over the past two years at times.”

Moran paid tribute to the impact of former Cavan boss Mickey Graham, who joined his management team this season, as “huge”. He expanded: “Since Mickey came in, we haven’t reinvented the wheel, we have done all of our training, our S&C, all that sort of stuff. It is nearly on-field decisions.

“A little one, we knew that Longford were getting well beaten last weekend by Wexford. Mickey was there to lean on, is it the right thing to tell the boys at half-time that they were getting well beaten? Even a decision like that – he goes, ‘Absolutely, you have to.’ He was in that position before.

“To have that experience... Mickey might have wanted a year or two out of being the head man, but he still loves being in there. He doesn’t have to deal with the stuff on the side – the county board, all of that. He still loves football. These little decisions... that is invaluable.”