The body's feeling fresh enough. Pat Flanagan realised the need for that.

Normally Kerry would be training three nights a week since the start of the year;

now they only go on Wednesdays, the odd week maybe on a Friday too. Tyrone's model is now Kerry's; on the five days they're away from each other, they're expected to be in the gym for two of them. So far the collective sessions have enthused O'Sullivan. "In 2004 we really enjoyed our training, maybe more than we did in 2005. That was because we had to get back winning. This year we're back enjoying the training more.

That happens after you've been losing."

In Kerry, one game constitutes "losing". Under Jack O'Connor they've won 16 out of 21 league games . . . Tyrone have won only 12 out of 21 over the same period . . . and lost only one out of 13 championship games, yet it is that one championship loss that hovers over the team. Well that and two certain other defeats to northern teams in 2002 and 2003. It's as if 2004 never happened.

Last Monday in his Irish Independent column, Eugene McGee rightly challenged Paidi O Se's ludicrous assertion that the team of All Talents that he played on would have dismantled the team that Jack built within 15 minutes; in this own writer's view, there's a case that the Kerry team of the past eight years has been the second-best the county has produced over the last 60 years. But then McGee went on to criticise Kerry for their "fairly indifferent performances" in this year's league, even though they've been considerably more impressive than either Tyrone or Armagh's. It's worth remembering that Kerry hardly ignited the 2004 league either until they hit Croke Park. And if you look close enough, there are other similarities between this campaign and '04.

Back then the camp spoke freely of playing with greater "steel". This year Billy Morgan and Cork weren't the only opposing camp taken aback by Kerry's physicality. Fermanagh, too, remarked on the intensity of the new style.

Inside the Kerry camp, such measures are justified on the basis of what they themselves have been subjected to. Privately they were seething with some of Tyrone's challenges on Colm Cooper last September, and more than once O'Connor has lambasted them for not physically standing up to Tyrone for their treatment of Gooch.

Kerry have had the grace and sense to concede both publicly and privately though that they weren't so much out-muscled by Tyrone as out-thought and out-played.

Whether they've realised how they were out-played and outthought remains open to contention.

As pleasing as the rejuvenation of Darragh O Se and the promising form of Kieran Donaghy must be for O'Connor, midfield was hardly where last year's All Ireland was lost; for the fourth consecutive game Tyrone were content to live off winning less than 40 per cent of kickouts and let O Se get more touches than any other player. Tom O'Sullivan subscribes to the popular theory that Kerry weren't tested enough earlier in the summer ("Even when Limerick put it up to us before Gooch's second goal, the atmosphere wasn't anything like you'd get in Croke Park"). But while the Kerry County Board should consider his claim that the county players should play more club games instead of training games in the summer ("I find club games nearly as hard as [inter-county] championship games; everyone wants to put a hit in on you and you get to handle more ball"), ultimately that theory is flawed. Kerry didn't need a passage like Tyrone's to prepare them for Tyrone's intensity. They needed a passage like Tyrone's . . .

which included a defeat and two draws . . . to expose how flawed the team was set up.

Ultimately Kerry lost last September because for the first time since Meath in the 2000 league semi-final a team had both the desire and the firepower to put Kerry down in a shoot-out. While Kerry had up to 11 starters who could score, they had only one scorer. Tyrone had three.

And even though one of them has retired, that still leaves them with one more than Kerry.

While Declan O'Sullivan has shown glimpses this spring of becoming the scoring machine 2003 suggested he'd be, there have also been periods where he's played far too deep, just as he did last September. Mike Frank Russell doesn't have the confidence of yesteryear because he no longer has its pace; by rushing his shots to compensate for that slippage, he's only scored one point from play in four league starts.

With Crowley, O Cinneide and Hassett all in the stand, content to just play club football, it seems ludicrous to think at 24, Declan Quill is up there with them. But after lighting it up in the league this past four springs only to sit on the bench for the past four summers, that's where he is.

The treatment of Quill is a classic example of how even a coach as exceptional as O'Connor can be guilty of the self-fulfilling prophesy. Over the years there has been a belief that Quill "can't win the hard ball" and "do it when it really matters". Yet in the mud and the rain of the league, when it's no place for what Eamon Dunphy calls the sunshine player, Quill has done it repeatedly, to the point where his ball-winning ability is irrelevant. If the Kerry set-up was as statsfriendly as its northern rivals' it would find that Quill's average of three points from play makes him one of the three leading point-scorers in Division One football this decade.

In the 2003 league Kerry were hammered in Galway, 113 to 0-9, yet Quill managed to kick five points from play. He had a similar return against Donegal when Kerry won a rare game up there. When Kerry beat Armagh by a point in a ferociously-contested league match that same spring, Quill kicked three hard-won points from play.

Charlie Mulgrew still claims the template for his team isn't Armagh or Tyrone but what Kerry produced when running up 2-18 against his Fermanagh team in 2004. Colm Cooper only came on in the dying minutes that day. Mike Frank Russell's three points were all from frees. Quill scored 1-2 from play; he features prominently when Mulgrew recalls his vision of perfect football.

Then there was last year, when Quill scored 1-4 from play against the Dubs and another five points against Mayo. When he kicked only one point from play against Tyrone though it seemed to confirm every prejudice held against him and he failed to start a single championship game. When 19-year-old Darren O'Sullivan came on ahead of him in the All Ireland final, it was, Quill's Kerins O'Rahilly's clubmate Eoin Liston concedes, "probably Declan's breaking point". The word in the Kerry camp last summer was that Quill wasn't doing the business in training games, but then that's the ultimate effect of the self-fulfilling prophesy; eventually a player's performance will conform to the coach's expectations. Quill might have been a luxury when scorers like O Cinneide and Crowley were around. For all the potential of under-21s like Bryan Sheehan and Kieran O'Leary, he isn't now.

Even if his ball-winning skills remain suspect, the question remains how good do they have to be. Conal Keaney and Alan Brogan's didn't have to be spectacular to torment Chris Lawn last August;

Dublin played intelligent low ball into them. Kerry, in contrast, made Lawn look like the player he was four years ago. Kerry need to look to hit more than Gooch in his corner or that high ball down the middle. Finding a way to feed another scoring inside forward is a must.

So is beating one of Ulster's Big Two in Croke Park. They might have to wait. While Kerry are rightly pursuing a league semi-final spot, aware that marginally missing out last year cost them a possible invaluable joust against Armagh, they may not find Armagh there for them this spring.

Eventually they should get their chance. Should they all remain the Big Three, then Kerry will play Ulster's runners-up in the All Ireland quarter-final. Then, if they win that, they'll face the Ulster champions in the All Ireland semi-final.

Tyrone and Armagh remain Kerry's measure. And Kerry, theirs.