Preview: Unlikely finalists ready to provide thrilling throwback

Today's All-Ireland final between Galway and Armagh represents a welcome throwback to the early noughties, an era especially beloved of Gaelic football fans.

The year between Galway's last All-Ireland win in 2001 and Armagh's first and only title the following year was taken to mark the transition from one era to another.

The former, the first won under the new backdoor system and also via the back door, felt, in retrospect, like the last All-Ireland final of the 1990s, a notion certainly strengthened by the fact that Meath entered the game as favourites.

The latter heralded a resurgence of Ulster football after a period of lull in the late nineties, though it was Tyrone who subsequently became more synonymous with that revolution - and its chief bogeymen in the eyes of the southern aristocracy.

Few anticipated the pair would pitch up in an All-Ireland final at the beginning of the championship, or even midway through the championship.

Except the Galway manager, that is. In the wake of their drawn group game in Markievicz Park in June, when the westerners had tossed away a seemingly unassailable advantage in the second half, Padraic Joyce texted Kieran McGeeney a message along the lines of "See ye in the final." There were no South African rugby players around to take offence, in this instance.

"He actually predicted two or three things that have all come true," McGeeney said at last week's Armagh press evening, after recounting the contents of the text message. "I have asked him who did he see winning the final, but he hasn't told me that yet."

Both managers, perhaps the two men most associated in the public mind with their counties' last All-Ireland victories, endured a few difficult early years, when their capability to do