All over the world this Sunday, the wild geese will gather in darkened taverns to see the match, writes FRANK SHOVLIN

THEY SAY Chicago is the second-biggest Polish city in the world after Warsaw. Whatever about that, Chicago surely must hold the biggest concentration of Mayo folk on the planet.

It was there I watched the famously awful semi-final of 1992, the only time Mayo ever met Donegal in the championship. The supporters of the green above the red dominated, but there were only good wishes for the sprinkling of Donegal people in the wake of their county’s defeat. There is no bad blood between these two great emigrant counties.

The teams that take the field on Sunday will have to invent some kind of dislike, as I cannot recall an All-Ireland final with less rancour between the fans.

All over the world this Sunday the wild geese will gather in darkened taverns: The Abbey in Chicago; The Black Swan in Oxford; Pogue Mahone in Liverpool. These have been the chief co-ordinates of my championship summers for the past 20 years.

They are the closest thing to home we exiles have on the Sundays of July and August, and then onward to the high Masses of September, when Croke Park rocks and even the most settled of us feel lonesome for home as the Artane Band marches, the national anthem is sounded and a stillness settles over the jostling throng.

I have become used to the county songs, some heard more often than others: The Rose of Mooncoin, The Banks, Galway Bay. And I recall with particular joy a Kilkenny man who would be first to the jukebox after every win to play Rod Stewart’s Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?

I needed to live outside Ireland for a long time to fully recognise and understand our national obsession with place and origin.

“Where are you from?” is always the first question we Irish ask, in a way that makes little sense for the natives of bigger, more disconnected countries such as Britain and the US.

And that question takes on heightened significance when asked between Irishmen abroad. They will want to know not just your county but your parish and club. As the son of a Donegal man and a Mayo woman, I have been faced with that question many times on my travels and have no straightforward answer.

My father’s job saw us move from county to county as children; when asked my origins I either tell a half-truth or begin a long litany, depending on the amount of drink taken. I spent many happy years in Castlebar, where, as a recently arrived 10-year-old, my father stuck a green and red flag in my hand and said: “You’re from Mayo now.”

That willingness to see his children change support with location never stopped his own life-long love for Donegal, a love he perhaps unwittingly passed on to me on a dreary day in Carrick-on-Shannon 30 years ago when we went from Castlebar in a mixed carload of Donegal and Mayo men to see Donegal win their first serious title, an under-21 All-Ireland, in a low-scoring game against Roscommon.

Following GAA abroad has changed a great deal with the advent of the internet, and now I’m probably better informed than many at home, as I can readily access the national dailies as well as more specialised Gaelic games websites.

In the past we would hunt out provincial newspapers in places such as Harvard Yard or Victoria Station. My father would send me clippings from one of the great GAA writers of our times, “The Follower” of the Donegal Democrat, whose eccentric style I still miss, cut with Irish proverbs and phrases from classical Latin.

Reading a Ballyshannon friend’s Democrat once on the bus to a national league game in Ruislip, I remember with amusement The Follower’s pride at travelling to London in style. No longer the cattle boat to Birkenhead, he wrote, but Ryanair to Stansted. No longer Pedigree Chum from begrudging landladies, but roast dinners with all the trimmings. Ireland had made the big time.

The night before the All-Ireland semi-final of 2003 I drove into the dark hills above Moycullen to get a good look at Mars. Some strange alignment of the heavens permitted a clear view of the red planet that year. It proved a bad omen for Donegal, who lost late to a harsh yellow card and an Armagh surge. I never imagined that the planets could conspire to produce a final between Mayo and Donegal, but here we are.

For one county, Sunday will bring heartbreak, the troubled silence of the long drive home and a winter without the seasoning of Sam.

Victory is always public, defeat intimate, and to support either Mayo or Donegal is to know your own private Via Dolorosa.

If, like me, you’ve followed both, then it’s as though you’ve been picking your way over the stones of Lough Derg for the past 20 years.

I can assure you that I’d rather do 100 stations than relive the All-Ireland final of 2006 or Donegal’s destruction at the hands of Armagh in the Ulster final two years earlier.

There have been times that both counties have brought me to the brink of despair, and other times (Croke Park 2006, Clones 1998) beyond it.

If you want to keep following these quixotic, frustrating, loveable counties, you have to learn to feel the fear and do it anyway. Victory will be bittersweet for me on Sunday, but I look forward to it like all my Christmases come together.

Frank Shovlin has been based abroad for almost 20 years. He lectures at the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool