Truth is, she didn’t have the stomach for it.

Cork had become accustomed to taking pride of place come the big day.

Ten finals and 10 titles in the previous 11 seasons will have that effect and the Ballinascarthy woman did her bit in claiming the last four of those having joined the panel in 2013.

“It was tough, to be fair,” she admitted ahead of this Sunday’s decider against Dublin.

I was actually in college at the time so I couldn’t even watch it.

“That was probably a good thing because it would drive you mad that you are not there and you were so close to being there.”

Absence has made the heart grow fonder.

Cork only lost their All-Ireland semi-final to Mayo last season by two points but margins are painfully thin at such rarefied heights and O’Brien looks back now and finds it easy to pinpoint just how and why the county fell short.

It was no one thing, just a drip feed of indulgences and no-nos: mornings when she may have stayed in bed rather than hit the gym.

Evenings when she didn’t stay behind after training to do those extra kicks.

Everyone was probably guilty of similar shortcomings.

Multiply those weaknesses by 30 or so panel members, and then the number of weeks spent prepping for the sharp end of the season, and it left the collective with an unfamiliar blunt edge.

“Staleness is probably a good word, and maybe even switching off (helped).

“Take time away from football and reenergise because a lot of the players had been going for five or six years.

“Even younger girls who are only 24 had been going for six years.

So it can creep in, complacency, if you are going that long. You can kind of go ‘oh, I don’t feel like doing my extra training today, maybe I’ll leave it off’.

“And that snowball effect starts maybe in May and maybe you end up not being in an All-Ireland final then.

“So, like, it was a collective. Everyone probably wasn’t in the right head space last year and Mayo were better than us and they were in the All-Ireland final. That was that.

We went away then for the winter and kind of did other things, which was great. We came back ready to go.”

The demands on players have never been higher.

O’Brien has seen as much in her five years on the panel and the Blues Sisters documentary on Dublin’s 2017 season made that plain to the public.

Even Mayo’s Sarah Rowe has expressed an element of shock at what the Dubs were doing behind the scenes.

I think it opened everybody’s eyes,” said O’Brien. “People will say to you that you go out training with Cork or whatever but we do much more than that.

“We’re not just going out on the pitch for an hour. Even in the last five or six years there is much more work being put in.

“What their documentary showed was the passion that they had and the drive that they had to win an All-Ireland. They had lost so many before that and they could have just given up.

“But it did show the desire they had to win one and make themselves a better team and individuals.”

Dublin’s drive will hardly be hindered by the presence across the Hogan Stand corridor on Sunday afternoon of a Cork team that had their number in four finals in the last decade, three of them coming on the trot between 2014 and 2016.

O’Brien doesn’t see it as being a driving force for them, suggesting that the one-point defeat of Cork at Croke Park in the league last February was enough to get that “monkey off their back”.

It’s not an entirely convincing argument but this is clearly a different Dublin side to before.

When O’Brien looks at them now she sees a reflection of Cork in the recent past.

“I know from experience with Cork that it is the years they have been together as a panel.

“They all know each other really well now after the last four or five years and there is no needing to read a player anymore. You know what someone next to you is going to do.

“They have that ability now whereas we have a lot of new girls in and we are still a bit fresh.

“They have the luxury of bringing on a girl who is going to freshen up their team and who is there for the last two or three years. They really know each other so well.”