In nine years as Armagh manager, Kieran McGeeney's only silverware was two Division 3 titles in 2015 and 2018. His third trophy, won six years after the last, is the biggest one possible.
It's not even three months since they were written off as perennial hard-luck merchants after another penalty shootout loss in an Ulster final.
Now, Sam Maguire is part of their entourage and in the aftermath of the win, McGeeney, flanked by Tiernan Kelly and Oisín O'Neill, paid tribute to his players' resilience in the face of so many bitter and grueling disappointments.
"To be honest, I'm just delighted for these boys," the manager said.
"Back when we were playing, we got a couple of carrots to keep us going, Ulster championships.
"We had a couple of knock-backs, but these fellas have got knock-back after knock-back after knock-back, and they just keep coming.
"Penalty shootouts, everybody telling them they can't win tight games, can’t beat teams above them... (pause) … (They) gave them a perfect answer. All-Ireland champions 2024.
"Delighted for them, absolutely over the moon. But to do what they’ve done over the last four or five years has been outstanding, to come back and win that one today."
After arriving as a head coach alongside Paul Grimley in 2014, very shortly after he was controversially dumped by Kildare, McGeeney somewhat inevitably stepped up the manager's job the following year.
Armagh had embarked on a run to the quarter-final in 2014, losing narrowly to eventual All-Ireland finalists in a Donegal in a tempestuous game. That campaign was an outlier in the context of the first half of the 2010s. As soon as the year concluded, they were hit by a wave or retirements and opt-outs (the latter being, in time, re-classified as retirements).
They failed to even win an Ulster championship match in his first four years in the job, though there was another back-door run to the quarter-final in 2017, which ended in a frightful beating against Tyrone, which hinted at some semblance of progress.
McGeeney appeared doomed to preside over a transitional (euphemism for 'bad') era for Armagh football. During most of his reign, the county has had scant pedigree at underage, notwithstanding the run to the All-Ireland minor final this year, with still no Ulster title at minor or U20/21 since 2009.
Through it all, he received heavy criticism for his team's failures, some of it perhaps borne of the assumption that his status as a player kept him in the job longer than results warranted. It was an arguable point at the time, though the county board who stuck by the manager have reaped an astonishing reward.
"You know, it feels quiet. It's like wearing a pair of ear muffs for a change, quietens all the noise," McGeeney joked.
Gradually, they progressed from being mid-ranking no-hopers to the outer fringes of the All-Ireland contenders. Which was their status until their gargantuan leap in July 2024.
"It took us (Armagh) 120 years to win the first one. It is difficult. It is not that you don't have the players and it is not that you can't, but the structures in the past have definitely been weighed against it.
"It is not a level playing field by any stretch of the imagination. Even finances and all that stuff, you are trying to bring things and change things in the background and bring structures in, you are trying to get clubs behind you.
"It is Armagh's responsibility now to see if they can do this because there are another four or five teams that would easily feel if they play Armagh tomorrow they'd beat them. It is up to these fells to want to improve and stay at the top and go on and try and win another one."
McGeeney, in particular paid tribute to the likes of Aidan Forker, Rory Grugan and the recently retired Stephen Sheridan, now part of the backroom team, who soldiered throug the lean years in the third tier.
"That is going back to Division 3. I asked a lot of people to stay and help and not everybody did. But they were willing.
"They were very young too. They showed great maturity and understood what I was talking about. I told them it was going to take time and that it wasn't going to be easy.
"Those three, in particular, would take a lot of hard feedback. There was some hard feedback from myself at times. They were always willing to do it. It is fantastic.
"That is how counties like ours work. You get waves of players and you are trying to keep those older players."
The borderline comical run of penalty shootout losses - remarkably, Armagh have lost four of all seven penalty shootouts in championship football since their introduction - had tested the faith of some, with a few clubs launching an attempted putsch against McGeeney's management after the loss to Monaghan last year.
"Sometimes your strongest steel is forged in fire," McGeeney said of the shootout losses.
"There is no doubt about that. It affects you in a way that is very hard to articulate to people, that when your personality is entwined in a victory or defeat and the impact that can have on you and what it can do.
"In those moments that we lost on penalties and those moments where we sat in there with our heads in our hands, did that have an impact on the last five minutes, definitely.
"When they refused to be beaten - even though we were trying our best to beat ourselves in that five or six minutes - there was fellas like Ben, everybody, throwing their bodies at the line just to win and to refuse that (feeling of defeat) once more."
How does it compare to winning as a player.
"I probably wasn't such a happy fella back then! So I probably feel happier now!
"No, I’m going to enjoy this one, I’m going to enjoy this week. I really am.
"I’m over the moon for these fellas, I hope they have a ball this week, because the county’s gone mad and I’ve been trying to keep them away from it. So, I’ll let them loose on it this week."
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