The dam-burst of emotion in Croke Park that greeted Westmeath’s victory over Meath in the 2015 Leinster SFC semi-final was perfectly understandable.

It was the Lake County’s first time to ever defeat their neighbours in Championship football, and by then the catalogue of painful near misses was long and lamentable.

The three successive championship campaigns from 2001 to 2003 was the most sustained period of regret, as Westmeath came agonisingly close on three occasions to ending the hoodoo but fell just short.

When the normally deadly-accurate Dessie Dolan missed a point-blank free to win the drawn 2003 Leinster quarter-final with the last kick of the game, Westmeath supporters must have thought they’d never get the sizeable Meath monkey off their backs.

That’s why it meant an awful lot to finally get the job done in 2015. And the achievement was made all the sweeter because they did to Meath what Meath had traditionally done to them – won a match they looked like losing for much of it.

Ger Egan was Westmeath’s captain in 2015, and when he casts his mind back five years he can identify a number of important forks in the road that to their day with destiny.

“We were relegated in the League (from Division Two) that year and our manager Tom Cribbin had a bit of an outburst afterwards,” says Egan.

“We had a meeting where we discussed everything and really it just showed what Tom was about too. Falling below certain standards just wasn't acceptable for him.

“That was a turning point in our season. We knew we had to knuckle down.

“Even then Tom was saying that we were going to get to a Leinster Final and I suppose people were laughing at him.

“But he was adamant and he believed in us. We trained hard and we started to build momentum. I had a very good relationship with him and I know 99 per cent of the team had the same.

“He was a very likeable fella. You'd die for him, and I think you need that quality in your manager.”

Westmeath had a very talented panel of players in 2015, but it was a young one too.

For all of their ability, there were question marks over their mentality and wherewithal to consistently reach their full potential.

To help them in that regard, Tom Cribbin brought Gerry Duffy into the set-up.

Duffy was an endurance who had won the UK Deca-Ironman challenge in 2010 – an achievement that saw him swim 3.8km, cycle 186km, and run 42km every day for 10 consecutive days.

His role wasn’t to increase the stamina of the Westmeath footballers, though, it was to make them tougher mentally.

“Gerry was in to help in whatever way he could, be it one to one with the players or with management,” says Egan.

“I remember he took a psychology session on the Thursday before the Meath match saying we'd be well able to do this and not be afraid to go and beat this team even though it had never been done before.

“He was a huge help, definitely, on an individual basis with the players. I know he helped Tom a lot too in terms of delivering speeches and information.

“He was nearly a friend more than anything else to the group. He was just so passionate about being there and seeing us achieve.

“Those people can't be overlooked either.”

The Westmeath players certainly displayed plenty of mental resolve to find a way to win that Leinster semi-final, because for a long time it looked like they might be on the wrong end of a hiding.

They trailed by 0-8 to 0-1 after 23 minutes, before Kieran Martin gave them a much-needed shot of adrenalin with a goal.

The scoreboard still looked pretty bleak at half-time with Meath leading by 2-12 to 1-7, but the Westmeath players and management were far from panicked by the hole they found themselves in.

“Half-time came at a good time,” says Egan.

“I know at half-time everybody would have been thinking that this game was over, but Tom was really relaxed at half-time

“We addressed a few things and had to get stuff together and get different man-markers on different players.

“We kind of just said we had a job to do and that's genuinely how we went about our business.”

Meath were still in control by the 50th minute, leading by 2-17 to 1-11, but the game turned when Kieran Martin scored his second-goal of the match having been relocated to full-forward.

“Yeah, the turning-point was probably Kieran's second goal and we got back within five or six,” says Egan.

“Graham Reilly got a black card for them, he had been playing really well, and that was another turning-point.

“So, there were those little moments and one seemed to lead to another. And, you know yourself, when a team gets on top of you it's very hard to turn it around. They never got an insurance score or a score to settle them down.

“I think (Padraic) Harnan was running through at one stage and could have fisted the ball over the bar to level it but went for a goal instead and we went down the field and (John) Heslin got his goal. I think we showed a bit of composure in the last ten minutes too and took scores when we had to.

“The crowd really got behind us too. There were the guts of 50 or 60 thousand in the stadium by the end of the game because Dublin were playing after and the lads really fed off that.

“I remember shouting at players around me and they couldn't hear anything and we had never really experienced anything like that either before. We'd never been in that cauldron before where there was such a crowd.

“They were all the little things for me that added to the whole thing.”

Incredibly, Westmeath outscored Meath by 2-8 to a 0-1 in the final 20 minutes of the match.

It was as if their whole team entered a state of flow as they just got better and better with every passing minute before finally ending the match with the emphatic exclamation mark of John Heslin’s spectacular breakaway goal.

“Yeah, it was surreal,” says Egan. “I have never been in that sort of atmosphere. You just look around and you know that everybody is just on the same page and we were winning kick-out after kick-out and lads were kicking scores.

“Kieran (Martin) and Hess (John Heslin) were just on a different planet in the second-half too. It's hard to take it all in too. You're trying to concentrate on your own job and you're just doing everything you can to get over the line and when the final whistle blows the scenes are unbelievable.

“I'm sure people were looking at us saying, 'Jesus, it's only a semi-final', but, like, Westmeath don't have too many days like that and you have to soak them in and enjoy them.

“The last 20 minutes were just unbelievable. They actually were. You couldn't hear anything. Everyone just seemed to be getting energy that you'd never seen before. You live for them big days.”

Westmeath didn’t win another match in the Championship in 2015, but that hardly diminished the warm-glow of their dramatic victory over Meath. No longer were they the but of their neighbours jokes, they’d finally delivered a punch-line of their own.

“You don't realise how much it meant to people until you got chatting to them in the following days,” says Egan.

“I remember leading into the Leinster Final afterwards against Dublin everyone was just on the crest of a wave.

“A local man died not long after the semi-final and I went to his funeral. The priest was saying this man watched the Meath match and after John Heslin scored the goal he said he could die a happy man.

“It's just mad the happiness it can bring to people.”

2015 Leinster SFC semi-final

WESTMEATH 3-19 MEATH 2-18

Scorers for Westmeath: J Heslin (1-9, 5 frees), K Martin (2-3), S Dempsey, J Connellan and P Sharry (2 45’s) (0-2 each), R Connellan (0-1).

Scorers for Meath: B McMahon (2-2), G Reilly and E Wallace (0-4 each), S Bray (0-3), A Tormey (two frees) and M Newman (one free) (0-2 each), B Menton (0-1).

WESTMEATH: D Quinn; K Daly, K Maguire, J Gilligan; J Dolan, K Martin, P Holloway; P Sharry, D Daly; R Connellan, G Egan, D Corroon; L Smyth, J Heslin, S Dempsey. Subs: J Connellan for D Daly (29), J Gonoud for K Daly (30), D Lynch for Smyth (h/t), D Glennon for Dempsey (39), P Greville for Gilligan (59), J Egan for Corroon (65).

MEATH: P O'Rourke; J McEntee, C McGill, D Tobin; B Menton, D Keogan, M Burke; H Rooney, Andrew Tormey; Graham Reilly, P Harnan, K Reilly; E Wallace, S Bray, B McMahon. Subs: M Newman for Harnan (18-19, blood), A Flanagan for Rooney (45), D Dalton for Burke (45), Newman for G Reilly (47, black card), B Power for Tormey (60), J Wallace for Tobin (62, black card), S Tobin for K Reilly (67), D Carroll for McEntee (68-70, blood).

Referee: Conor Lane (Cork).