GAELIC GAMES/All-Ireland SFC Quarter-final Fermanagh v Tyrone: Fermanagh boss Dominic Corrigan talks to Keith Duggan about this summer's exceptional highs and dreadful lows.

Driving through the dense green back roads of the border lands on a July evening.

A siren wailing through the countryside, the leafy coolness above and no conversation, just the tilt and sway of the hot, dry roads. Peace.

On these narrow roads of mid-Ulster, you move between the two worlds of the "Wee Six" and the South with absolutely no ceremony.

Sometimes the only way to tell is by the quality of the tarmac. When Dominic Corrigan was a boy, he used to play for Swanlinbar in the Cavan leagues and walk home to Kinawley afterwards.

The border hardly registered. Southern trees were no different than those on the Corrigan land. He would be a Reilly or a King, a Cavan boy for the day. It was no harm.

Fermanagh is a small county, but it is a maze, a web of these forgotten roads spun around Lough Erne, pulling towards Donegal to the west, Tyrone to the east and Cavan in the south.

He thought he knew every trick and short-cut there was, but the gardaí hustled through the plain and splendid countryside in remarkable time that evening.

Forty minutes after shaking Seán Boylan's hand at the door of the dressing room, he was back in the hospital by his brother's bedside.

Dessie had lapsed into unconsciousness days beforehand, but Dominic told him anyway. "That we had won and that we had beaten Meath and that we did it for him."

That drive, the solemnity of just being in the back seat will stay with Dominic Corrigan for a long time. Even as he was travelling, word spread like gorse fire across the country.

People were hearing that Fermanagh had beaten Meath, but they were slow to comprehend. Nobody gave the Ulster county a chance.

What are you supposed to feel in a moment like that? The consultants had given his brother hours, a day at best, before he departed the world and, for a precious few of those, Dominic had been wrapped up in a football game.

He had left behind him a Fermanagh dressing-room in a state of happy chaos. Joy and pride surging from men so strongly you could smell it.

The inner sanctum of Clones is a long, brick corridor with steam from the showers that cause the walls to drip. And how he moved from that anarchic scene, with the fierce hugs and the warm cursing and the celebrations to where Dessie lay, in dim-lit dignity, with his family and decades of the rosary without feeling strange he does not know.

All he knows is that it felt right. His brother passed away the next morning.

"I think what this whole time has cemented for me is the comfort that sport can bring to you in times of difficulty. That is certainly how it has been for the Corrigan family.

"Dessie was diagnosed with cancer on Holy Thursday, three days before we played Tyrone in Croke Park in the league. And the shock of it was there for a long time afterwards, it took a fair time to hit home.

"Sport can have an uplifting effect and in a small way, it is helping us to get through all of this."

Personal grief has been the backdrop for Corrigan's remarkable season with Fermanagh. The state of football in the county has been so perilous for so many decades that being involved often meant committing yourself to a sombre mood at the best of times.

Although he competed in an Ulster final in 1982 at the age of 20, Corrigan's inter-county career was long and frustrating and consisted mainly of comparing the low years with those that were all but intolerable.

"The worst?" he smiles. "God, I remember taking a fierce hiding from Derry in Irvinestown. It must have been 1986. Paddy Green was manager and we were well prepared. But they destroyed us."

Corrigan's first term as manager ended on a similarly ignominious note in Portlaoise last year when Kerry seemed to toy with the Ulster team as they trounced them.

It was a surprising lapse by a team that had learned to be competitive and drew shivers. Some, like Rory Gallagher - as much a virtuoso as his guitar-hero namesake - opted out of football.

Others grew more resolute. This was the summer that many of the players had vowed would be their year.

"Boys came to me and said they would move heaven and earth for an Ulster."

In late April, with all possibilities still open, Dominic would visit Dessie in the hospital before, and sometimes after, training. They would talk about football and Dominic's arrival would sometimes irritate his older brother.

"He told me not to be worrying about him. 'Get the job done, I want you to do that. Make sure those boys are ready.' And from then on I wanted to do what he said and I wanted to make sure I had them right."

It taught him a lot, this last two months. He was reared on talk of the life and death importance of the championship, on the casual observations and promises that fill every bar in every county in the summer.

For years they had washed over him and then suddenly this news, this inexplicable and shocking happening, made him see some sort of link. Dessie's illness never became a cause for Fermanagh football or anything syrupy like that.

At training, the players privately asked how things were going and in a few sentences, he felt their compassion. That was it. But Dominic was the manager of this football team and in the heaviest and most awful days he had ever known, the game still managed to consume him, it made him raise his voice, made feel anger. Made him feel.

In a fated world, Fermanagh would have swept towards its first ever Ulster title and then, maybe, Dominic could have dedicated that achievement to his brother.

But the real world, and in particular, Fermanagh's world, is not fated. It is messy and sometimes laughably tough. So, of course, there was to be Ulster final for his team, but instead another semi-final implosion against Down.

And afterwards the verdict: Same old Fermanagh, a joke that stopped being funny years ago. Fodder.

The seven days between the loss against Down and the meeting with Cavan, neighbours who still dined out on ancient achievements, was as low as Corrigan felt. His brother was weakening fast and blindly, innocently even, he found himself throwing his energies into another Fermanagh football season that was on the verge of disintegration.

"Before that Cavan game, we all met in the Fort Lodge Hotel. The players were still down, feeling sorry for themselves. You could sense it. They were thinking we have no Ulster and we will not be winning no All-Ireland. They were empty.

"So I told them I was just after coming from a hospital seeing a man of 51, five children. Everything to live for and days to live. And I said he's sufferin', but he is not feelin' sorry for himself. And I'm looking down at fit young men good enough to play football in front of 15,000 people the next day, Fermanagh versus Cavan.

"Don't feel sorry for yourselves. Live it. I said there are 40 or so of us here in this room and some of us will be struck down with something like this.

"Hopefully not in the short term but at some point down the road. So appreciate this and enjoy every healthy day. And I was glad I said it."

And they didn't all charge out of the room. They sighed and they shifted and they said nothing. But they listened. And around the same time, he took a phone call from Paul Brewster who told him he had nothing left in his heart, that he didn't want to play.

Brewster! For years the leanest, the most devoted, the great believer in Fermanagh football. And Dominic Corrigan told him what he believed. He told him if he didn't feel he wanted to play, then there was no point. But he also told him that if he were to be true to himself, then he would show up at the ground named after his father and bury his disappointments on that sod.

"Or else he would be living with it for the rest of his life. Looking back now, there was no way that Brewster could have gone out on a note like that."

Fermanagh won. Not spectacularly but in a way that made them feel like football could matter again. And Dominic has been around the game too long to say that he believes that it all came down to inspiration, to hearing what he said in the Fort Lodge.

Mostly, it came down to all their training and to hard tackles and good passing and desperation: prosaic and everyday things. Football is, after all, too tough and random to be considered spiritual.

Dessie, the eldest of the Corrigan's, never played much because the opportunity was not there for him. Growing up in rural Fermanagh in the late 1950s, there was simply no structure.

It was Dominic, the youngest of five boys in a house with eight children, was the most fortunate in that regard. When he was 10, he played in goals with his brothers on the local under-14 team.

"There was this one day against Erne Gaels of Belleek and they were just raining goals in on me. Sure I was too short to jump high enough. And I heard this fella - it turned out to be Arthur McCafferty who I played in the Ulster final of 1982 - shout, 'just get it on target, lads'. It always stuck with me.

"And afterwards, Cannon McCafferty was bringing a rake of us home in his car - eight lads in the back kind of thing. He picked us up outside the sweet shop and I remember him growling, 'Corrigan, will I take you home at all'. But football was all we really had then."

Dominic played all-grades for Fermanagh. His teenage years, in the 1970s, coincided with a period that ought to have been richer for the county. The under-21 teams of 1970/'71 lost two All-Ireland finals to Jimmy Barry Murphy's Cork, but somehow failed to break through during a lean period in Ulster.

The closest they came was 1982 and by then, that team was waning. Corrigan played with his county until 1993. After that, he threw his energies into winning MacRory Cups with St Michael's, Enniskillen. In 10 years, Fermanagh underwent a small but subtle shift.

It developed a stubborn streak; it became a tougher draw. Sigerson football taught Belcoo and Derrygonnelly boys not to be afraid of players from Cross', from Derry, from Tyrone.

By the time Corrigan took over last year, Fermanagh could dare talk of a future.

"I would have taken this team over to win things. A lot of people would see Fermanagh as a second-class place. But I never felt that way about it myself.

"And I think that Peter Quinn's ascension to the presidency of the GAA was important because it showed us that Fermanagh people, in whatever walk, can be as good or even better than anyone else."

This year, they are showing that. There is talk of Croke Park being a sell-out tomorrow. It will be like a mass gathering of the Ulster clans. And Fermanagh among them.

The night that the draw was made, Dominic was watching on television with his children. Tomás and Blánaid and Rúairí were fond of holding their own draws; it became a family ritual.

"And Laois will play . . . Fermanagh," declared Blánaid. It sounded perfect and somehow unbelievable. When they sat down to watch the real show, they knew why.

Ulster. You can't escape it.

"Whenever the children saw Tyrone, it fairly killed the interest," he laughs.

Last week, Dominic had to go visiting people in Tyrone. The All-Ireland champions-in-waiting. He was stunned by the attitude towards Fermanagh. It was as if beating Meath and Mayo didn't count.

Sorry for yer troubles. Sure maybe ye will keep it close and wouldn't that be great. Respect is earned over years, not games. He knows that. Tomorrow, Fermanagh play in a football match that is their biggest . . .

"Ever. Yeah. This is it," laughs the manager. He has not dwelt on the significance, happy instead to worry about travel arrangements and the number of footballs to bring and what he will say.

Everybody in the country is pleased that Fermanagh is here and nobody really believes they can go much further. His job is to defy that assumption, to force another ounce of respect.

The occasion, the significance of bringing a Fermanagh team out on to Croke Park is for later. See, Dominic Corrigan's favourite time is the morning after a championship win. Then, he rises quietly in his home and goes for a 7 a.m. run around the field at St Michael's.

"You get your thoughts together and really savour what happened the day before and there is not a sinner about. It's a magnificent feeling."

He thinks about how different his world is since he last playing in 1993. Every September, he gives bleep tests to first years in St Michael's and the results are troubling to him.

The indolence, the sedentary lifestyle, the invidious influence of Game boy culture has taken a grip on youngsters. He worries, even for his own kids, who play sport. Being young seems more complicated than in his day.

And yet he knows the North is a better place. The days of checkpoint interrogations as he made his way to Fermanagh training are a distant memory. Enniskillen, where he now lives, is a more relaxed town. This week, he has received phone calls from the Protestant community just to say, up Fermanagh.

That would not have happened 10 or 15 years ago. You're putting us on the map, they tell him.

He thinks about all these things as he runs lap after lap. And he thinks about Dessie and how he would love this weekend and how weird it is not to be phoning him up.

He still hears their conversations. Don't be worryin', his brother demanded. Make sure they are right. And on every Sunday, he does his best to reply.

Fermanagh

Ulster quarter-final

Fermanagh 0-10 Donegal 0-6

Ulster semi-final

Down 2-10 Fermanagh 0-11

Qualifier - Round Two

Fermanagh 0-16 Cavan 1-10

Qualifier - Round Three

Fermanagh 1-12 Meath 0-9

Qualifier - Round Four

Fermanagh 0-12 Mayo 1-8

Played: 5. Won: 4. Drew: 0. Lost: 1.

Tyrone

Ulster quarter-final

Tyrone 0-12 Derry 1-9

Replay

Tyrone 0-17 Derry 1-5

Ulster semi-final

Tyrone 1-17 Antrim 1-9

Ulster final

Tyrone 1-17 Down 4-8

Replay

Tyrone 0-23 Down 1-5

Played: 5. Won: 3. Drew: 2. Lost: 0.

Paths to the quarter-final