The future hunger striker was a left-back for Star of the Sea - a north Belfast team that brought Catholics and Protestants together in Rathcoole. The team is the focus of a TV documentary

We open with archive footage. Rosaleen Sands sits down for an interview, just three days before her son, Bobby Sands, the elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, would pass away while on hunger strike.

When asked about their conversations, you might anticipate discussions of politics. The British state.

Imprisonment. The grievances that had shaped his existence and would ultimately shape his passing.

Yet she speaks of football.

Of the most joyful period of his life. Of a club called Star of the Sea.

Bobby Sands is widely recognised. A Republican figurehead.

An individual who gave his life for his beliefs, whose identity became forever etched into Northern Ireland's past. What's less known is that he played left-back.

That prior to becoming an emblem, he was a young lad kicking a ball in north Belfast, member of a squad that united Catholics and Protestants in an area that would later become emblematic of their division.

An extraordinary documentary (Réalt na Mara - An Pheil, Na Trioblóidí agus An Iarmhairt) has been produced chronicling this team's journey. The fate of the lads who wore its colours.

And the gulf between the realm they momentarily shared and the reality that would ultimately tear it apart.

This isn't a tale with a cheerful conclusion. But joy existed, at one time.

And that holds significance. In the beginning, there was a football team.

The demolition of inner-city slums in Belfast gave rise to a new housing estate at Rathcoole in north Belfast. It was a mixed neighbourhood, where Protestants outnumbered Catholics by roughly four to one.

At its heart was Star of the Sea.

The club became a powerhouse. They remained undefeated for two years, claimed the coveted Junior Cup and were regular fixtures in the sports sections.

It calls to mind that observation made by Earl Warren, the former chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, as he contemplated American society in the 1960s.

"I turn to the back pages first because there they tell stories of man's achievements; the front pages are full of stories of men's failures."

For a period, Star of the Sea belonged on the back pages. Bobby Sands occupied the left-back position.

Michael Acheson and Terry Nicholl played alongside him. They were teammates, young lads sharing a changing room.

The sectarian differences that would ultimately come to define them appeared, temporarily, to be almost irrelevant. Then history stepped in.

Sands would go on to become a Republican martyr. Acheson and Nicholl became involved in the Ulster Volunteer Force.

Men who had previously been part of the same football squad ended up on opposing sides of the conflict. During the 1970s, a wire fence within the Maze prison stood between Sands and Nicholl.

Consider that for a moment. The very lads who had once lined up together on the football field, now separated by mere feet of fencing in a jail constructed to hold those caught up in their nation's breakdown.

The squad that triumphed so spectacularly on the pitch would suffer devastating losses off it. Sands, Acheson and Nicholl lost their freedom.

Sands and another teammate, Tommy O'Neill, lost their lives before they reached middle age.

And Raymond McCord, amongst the team's most gifted players, would ultimately lose his son. But that comes later.

First, there was the football.

McCord possessed enough talent to secure a trial with Manchester United and to represent Northern Ireland schoolboys. He had climbed the lower slopes of a sporting peak, near enough to see what possibilities lay ahead.

The top remained far off, but he had progressed further than most lads ever manage.

However, when McCord reflects, it isn't Old Trafford that captivates him. It is Star of the Sea.

"We went from two communities to one community the moment we walked through that door," he says. "There was no religion or politics in the club because it would not have been tolerated."

The squad maintained discipline. But it also enjoyed plenty of laughs.

"They were the best days of my life," says Dessie Black, the goalkeeper. "It was laugh a minute. We were a brilliant team but aside from winning, we had fun. Enormous fun.

"The Catholic and Protestant thing didn't matter. It took a long time to figure out who was Catholic, who was Protestant."

They were simply lads with a game to play. Their backgrounds existed, but these did not need to define them entirely, for they had discovered, within a small football club, a way of life that the turbulent world surrounding them could not provide.

Then the Troubles erupted.

Violent unrest in central Belfast resulted in homes being set ablaze and families forcibly displaced. People were relocated to new housing estates, carrying whatever remnants they could salvage from their former lives.

Rathcoole, once a haven where families had come to start afresh, became yet another battleground in the widening conflict.

"It was like a cancer spreading," McCord says.

Tommy O'Neill, a close friend of Sands, laid bare the harsh reality in a 1983 interview: "You got hit because you were a Catholic. You got targeted."

The lads who had once shared a dressing room were now being divided along religious lines. Families - including the O'Neills and the Sands' - were hounded out of their homes by loyalist vigilantes.

Star of the Sea was torn apart. Players dispersed.

The potential of the team, and of the futures its members might have enjoyed, began to fade. McCord remained.

He could have pursued his footballing ambitions elsewhere. After all, United had offered him a six-week trial.

Other clubs presented alternative opportunities. Yet his loyalty lay with Star of the Sea, rather than with a club bearing a stronger Protestant identity.

His father may well have been an Orangeman. A loyalist gang broke his nose for playing for Star of the Sea.

He remained regardless. What stands out most about McCord isn't simply that he survived the brutality - it's what he refused to allow that brutality to steal from him in its aftermath.

He didn't transform his old team-mates into outsiders or straightforward antagonists. While he couldn't square the lads he'd grown up with and the paramilitary groups three of them ultimately became part of, he recognised that they too had been changed by events.

"The three guys I knew at Star of the Sea, I could never see them killing people but they joined organisations that did that."

McCord holds the Troubles responsible for the paths those former team-mates took.

Seanna Walsh, who knew Sands and served time with him, draws a comparable line. According to Walsh, Sands wasn't sectarian and rejected sectarianism outright.

His grievance lay with the British state, not with the Unionist population.

Within the unionist community - who, like their nationalist counterparts, endured tremendous suffering - maintaining such a distinction can prove challenging.

Yet the reality remains that Sands' dispute was with the British establishment rather than his Protestant neighbours.

This distinction carries weight given how Sands was brought up by his family and the impact Star of the Sea had on him. The football club had shown these young men a vision of how a team - and consequently a society - could succeed.

Then the defeats arrived. Both Sands and O'Neill perished.

Players departed Northern Ireland, with four leaving the country due to the Troubles. The squad fragmented.

Sporting headlines were replaced by breaking news. Yet the heartbreak was far from over.

In 1997, McCord's son, Raymond McCord junior, was murdered by the UVF. His body was found in a quarry.

He had been beaten to death. No one has ever been convicted of his murder.

The documentary, Réalt na Mara (Star of the Sea), draws viewers into the devastating personal reality of what came next: a father identifying his son's body, confronting the fact that the boy he had raised was gone.

There exist sorrows that words can express but never fully capture. Observing McCord recall that experience, one witnesses the anguish of a parent who has outlived his son, now forced to navigate a future without him.

McCord might have let that pain become hatred. Instead, he dedicated himself to advocating for Troubles victims, regardless of their background, Catholic or Protestant.

His efforts have resulted in multiple death threats.

The director, James Wynne, recognises in him a form of bravery that seldom captures headlines.

"Raymond's humanity and resilience is incredible," Wynne says. "No matter who knocks on his door, if they need help, he will campaign for them."

It's hard to conceive of a more remarkable reaction to bereavement. McCord has every justification to contain his mourning, to demand that his pain belongs to one faction and that fairness should only extend to one group.

Yet, he rejects the very framework upon which the violence was built.

He recalls what football demonstrated to him: that an individual is always more complex than the label someone else wishes to assign them. The lads at Star of the Sea weren't living in ignorance.

They understood they existed in a fractured society and were well aware of the rifts that ran through it. However, once they stepped inside the club, those barriers weren't permitted to define their relationships with each other.

They recall an era when the back pages told their story.

Tragically, Star of the Sea couldn't protect them. A football club proved powerless against the weight of history, and a changing room couldn't stem the tide of violence building beyond its walls.

Yet it demonstrated what could be achieved.

That's the true scale of what was taken away. Not merely the casualties, the displaced families and the lost time.

The very potential for something better.

On a football ground in north Belfast, a collection of young people once discovered how to forge a single community. Then reality forced them to split into two.

And the front pages filled with the consequences.