This week, he made reference to a letter that was passed on to him, a letter from another man of the cloth, Fr Leo Morahan, a former county board chairman from Mayo not afraid to put county loyalties aside and offer Roscommon football a shoulder to cry on after the debacle of 2005. By way of encouragement, Morahan sourced a friend who met the Kennedy clan after their fall from power and said: "Did you lose your friends?" The reply was: "No, we found our friends."

This newspaper's post championship review ranked Roscommon at 28 of the 33 inter-county teams, a positioning that Devine referred to in his first column of the new year as being on the equivalent of "football's Skid Row". Stephen Lohan, one of the few elder statesmen to survive a panel cull by new manager John Maughan, doesn't even attempt to contest the finding. "In terms of where we were in 2001 and 2003, it was a bit of a shock but the statistics don't lie. It was there in black and white and you just have to accept it."

How it bottomed out? The 2005 season was the year when financial irregularities off the field mirrored the football ones on the field, Roscommon undergoing a change of chairman in mid-season to match the untimely departure of manager Tommy Carr before the end of the National League in March amidst a background of player dissent.

Val Daly stepped into the breach but a one-point defeat by Louth in round two of the qualifiers, less than a fortnight after an eight-point Connacht semi-final defeat by Mayo, saw Roscommon's stock continue to plummet.

Enter John Maughan. With eight weeks of hard training done since he first introduced himself to the panel in early November, Lohan admits that "the players' fitness levels have gone way up". He'd almost forgotten what it was like to win on two consecutive Sundays. A first competitive game of the season ended on a scoreline of Roscommon 110 Sligo 0-10; the second, Roscommon 3-12 NUIG 0-12.

This afternoon, the county plays host to Mayo with a place in the FBD League final at stake, the first time John Maughan will manage a Connacht team against his own county, the sub-plot that lifts the fixture above the mundane. He's done it before of course during his stints in charge of Clare and Fermanagh but local rivalries and the freshness of his departure from Mayo has fanned the flames of local intrigue.

Selector Gerry Fitzmaurice owns a pub in Ballinlough, nothing more than "a long kick from the pitch" that straddles the Mayo border and plays host to this afternoon's bout of shadow-boxing. He says that the panel is open-ended and is keen to stress that there was no hidden agenda: "John had his own plans in mind, his own age profile in mind."

And so the teamsheet is still more noticeable for who's missing than who's included.

Omitting Frankie Dolan, Nigel Dineen, Francie Grehan, Shane Curran and Michael Ryan from the initial panel was a statement of intent. Maughan clearly wanted to start with a clean slate, for all the talent and experience of those players.

Working off a panel of close to 40, the all-weather training facilities in Kilbride have allowed the players to combine a bit of ball work with the hard, physical sessions. Those based in Dublin train together, while the county board's drive for cost-effectiveness sees the bulk of those working or based outside the county taken by bus from Galway and Sligo twice a week.

Lohan admits that 2005 was the lowest point in his time with Roscommon but says the fact that a manager of Maughan's calibre was prepared to take on the job in such circumstances tells its own tale. "There's huge respect there. You'd want to be very foolish as a player to try and undermine him.

Every manager has his own ideas but John must have seen the potential there or he wouldn't have taken on the job."

The league though will be a truer test of any progress made. Last year's campaign was peppered with potholes.

Being held at home by Clare and Carlow in the opening two games set the tone. Fermanagh hit four goals past them on their way to a 10point defeat and a miserable run was rounded off by a sixpoint loss to Leitrim. It left Roscommon third from bottom in Division 2A, ahead of Clare and London, and behind Carlow, Leitrim, Longford and the promoted pairing of Monaghan and Fermanagh. A couple of FBD League victories have engendered a bit of optimism but the first proper test comes with an away tie against Limerick in the opening round of the National League in a fortnight's time.

Maughan has been around long enough to know that sentiment has no place on a football field. This afternoon won't be any different.