In the years before Larne boasted Northern Ireland’s most successful football team, the harbour town was perhaps best known for the ferry to Cairnryan.
But in the week when the Inver Park club will make history by taking part in the league phase of the Conference League, it is a crossing to Scotland that will not be made which has become the story.
In turning down the opportunity to take over the vacant post at St Johnstone, manager Tiernan Lynch became the second Irish Premiership boss, after Linfield’s David Healy, to reject overtures from the SPFL in as many months.
BBC Sport looks at how the decisions have challenged assumptions in the domestic game and what it means for the seasons ahead.
In the wake of the news that Lynch would be staying put, Scottish striker Andy Ryan, the player whose hat-trick against Lincoln Red Imps in August secured Larne’s Conference League progression, said it was only natural that managerial talent in the Irish Premiership would now be attracting the same interest as has been shown in its players.
Conor McMenamin moved from Glentoran to St Mirren two summers ago, while this year Ronan Hale swapped Cliftonville for Ross County. In a wider sense, players like Stuart Dallas and Gareth McAuley starred in England having first banked plenty of experience for clubs at home, with the national side’s most recent captain Trai Hume a present day example.
Yet, prior to this year, similar managerial advances felt relatively rare.
Tommy Wright and Kenny Shiels, with St Johnstone and Kilmarnock respectively, both won silverware in Scotland having done likewise when cutting their managerial teeth back home. Even that pair, though, assumed the top jobs at their clubs only after first serving as assistants.
Most recently, Oran Kearney parlayed an impressive first stint at Coleraine, where he now serves in a director of football role, to the manager’s job at St Mirren in 2018 but returned home after just 10 months in charge.
Perhaps the most likely cause for the recent uptick in interest is the same reason both Lynch and Healy have opted to stay put.
To turn down any advance from “across the water” would once have been viewed as an unfathomable lack of ambition but, as the improving standards of domestic football in Northern Ireland catch the eye of those elsewhere, it has also made it less attractive a proposition for the likes of Lynch and Healy to leave.
The figureheads of Larne and Linfield, the sides who have accounted for the last six league titles, came to their distinctly different clubs in distinctly different circumstances only to recently arrive at the same conclusion.
Healy, the record goal-scorer for the Northern Ireland men’s national team, returned home after a playing career that started at Manchester United and included spells with Leeds United, Preston North End and Fulham.
In returning to the same Windsor Park ground where he served his country with such distinction, the former striker was taking on a job where winning was not an ambition but an expectation.
Lynch, in contrast, was once on the books of Cliftonville but built his coaching career first by helping his brother with the north Belfast side’s under-age sides and then as an assistant to Eddie Patterson at Glentoran. When he took the job at Larne, the side who had then never won a league title were in the lower reaches of the second tier.
The back-to-back top flight titles that have followed were facilitated by an unprecedented shift in the structure of the club bankrolled by its owner, the online property agency Purplebricks co-founder Kenny Bruce.
Professionalism is a recent concept in the Irish Premiership – both Linfield and Larne are among the league’s full-time teams, though some clubs remain part-time and others employ a hybrid model – with the change meaning managers no longer have to leave home to test themselves in that environment.
Job stability and opportunities to showcase their managerial talents in European competition likely have factored in for both men too.
In the short-term, Larne and Linfield will feel more confident about the title race that lies ahead for having their manager remain in the dug-out. While it is easy to point to the financial strength of both clubs, one only has to look elsewhere around the league to be reminded that higher wage bills and transfer budgets are no guarantee of managerial success.
Further down the line, Healy had spoken in the past of ambitions to manage in England and Scotland but more recently described himself as “content” at Linfield and talked of the “sway” his family would have in any call to leave.
Although Lynch is yet to address the media since his own decision, Larne players have already admitted to the inevitability that, should the success at Inver Park continue, more clubs will come calling for their manager and that he will ultimately move on.
In the case of both however, after rejecting advances that would once have been viewed as a step up, some may wonder if not now, when?
