Their rollercoaster has slowed after the dramatics involved in beating Sligo in a replay, climbing to the apex of another hill before swooping down again. This afternoon they head to Carrick-on- Shannon full of vigilance. Last year when they met Leitrim in a qualifier, Roscommon played atrociously and needed a defensive mistake and a goal in the last second to save their season. They should be clued in enough this afternoon to tiptoe their way through, but this year is about the team losing the curse of novelty and adding some substance to what people think of them, and what they can achieve. An All-Ireland quarter-final came and slipped through their hands last year without them even pausing to take in the occasion or show what they could do. That much, at least, needs to be put right.
“It was probably my biggest regret of the year,” says manager Tom Carr, “even more so than losing in Connacht (against Galway) because I didn’t feel we were ready to win a Connacht title. But the way we went out and played, before we realised in the last 20 minutes that it wasn’t as big a task as maybe we thought.”
“We definitely left something behind,” says Dolan. “I don’t know, it was a completely different experience to anything I played in before. Completely different stadium. The atmosphere was different. The ball flew differently, it was very hard to come in there and just go,‘Bang!’ We’re in to win this game. You’ve got to play regularly in Croke Park so hopefully it’ll stand to us.”
Croke Park will wait as the most pressing issues remain domestic ones. Since Carr arrived, a team that were once the centrepiece of any number of saucy stories have reacted well to his whip. The troublesome ones have been rooted out and more of the better players have been reformed. Last year they made some progress but worried too much about playing Galway and Kerry. Every other time they showed grit, character and that they could play ball. They just need to learn how to do that more often.
“You learn about performing under pressure,” says Dolan. “You learn a lot about your players in extra-time, how they react under that kind of pressure. This team is maturing now, and the players are performing better and with more consistency.
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“Maybe we’ll never have 15 perform all at one time but that’s what Tommy is trying to drill into us. We don’t have naturals in every position like Kerry or Tyrone. We’d probably be in the same boat as Offaly or Westmeath where we’d have three or four really good footballers, but we just don’t have the pick of the big counties for the rest.”
Their inconsistency has helped to create some of the year’s most enthralling games, but lost them too many. Against Donegal in the League they count five goal chances they missed, and they lost the game and saw promotion slip away with it. In the drawn game against Sligo they had the match in their hands at half-time, yet had to produce a mighty effort to get back into the replay.
“It has been a trait in our games,” says Dolan. “We play for 30 or 40 minutes, then we stop. We’ve been talking about that, that we can’t just stop playing.”
Master that, and their results might amount to more than the novelty of two summers.
Leitrim v Roscommon, today, Carrick-on-Shannon, throw-in 3.30pm