A few images from that day remain with Walsh. The number of Galway people on the pitch afterwards, Savage's lobbed goal, Ciaran McDonald's shot off the crossbar.

Otherwise that Mayo-Galway game blurs into all the others.

"If we were playing Sligo or Roscommon, there would be much more niggle. With Mayo it was far more open.

Maybe because both teams believed so much in their own ability to win, they didn't care what the other did - they were just going out to play. I'd have admired the Mayo lads that way. They didn't resort to dirt. There were times when they had seven or eight men who could play midfield.

"You had the two Mahers, Willie Joe [Padden], TJ Killgallon, [Padraig] Brogan. [Liam] McHale would probably have been the best of the lot if they didn't feck him around playing him full-forward and centre-forward.

Personally, I think that's why they haven't got over the [All Ireland] line this past few years; they've fine backs but haven't consistently had a big man in the middle. But there were years there when they had midfielders playing fullback, centre-back and centre-forward. All big men who hit hard. Yet you'd rarely get any messing from them."

Across the border, the feeling was mutual. Martin Carney remembers being involved in the odd dour, negative Galway-Mayo game, like the infamous 1987 Connacht final. For someone who played with Donegal in Ulster though, the return west was a cultural shock. "With Galway-Mayo, there isn't that nastiness that you'd traditionally get in the Leinster championship or Ulster championship. Ulster has always been far more tribal in its intensity. With Galway and Mayo, they've tended to play within accepted boundaries.

For instance, you'd seldom get players sent off in it.

Whereas, say, if Tyrone and Derry meet, you can expect a glut of red and yellow cards."

The stats back him up.

Since 1995 there have been nine Galway-Mayo and nine Derry-Tyrone championship matches. Only once in Connacht has there been a red card. Only twice in Ulster has there not been a red card - the tempestuous 2001 Ulster semi-final when Tyrone alone were shown eight yellow cards, and the 2002 qualifier in Casement. The average number of yellow cards in a Mayo-Galway game this century is four. In Derry-Tyrone it's eight. That 2002 qualifier was the only Tyrone-Derry game this past decade that would have ticked all the neutral's boxes. Galway-Mayo, in contrast, has only disappointed as a spectacle in 2002 and 2005. For four years straight from 1996 to 1999, Galway-Mayo was one of the best five games of the year.

2003 and 2004 were also a pile of fun. Although Mayo's All Ireland famine has tended to overshadow it, the reality is, with the possible exception of the recent and compelling Tyrone-Armagh soap opera, no other rivalry in football this past 10 years has been as satisfying as GalwayMayo.

"A lot of those games were a privilege to play in, " agrees Liam McHale. "A big part of it was the contrast in styles.

We knew in '96 and '97 that they were coming, that their forwards were exceptional.

It was our athletic power and, in fairness to John Maughan, our organisation that kept them down in '96 and '97 but by '98 those forwards had matured. That's probably the big reason why they've won All Irelands and we haven't.

They've had some very good forwards in the likes of [Derek] Savage, [Niall] Finnegan and Paul Clancy, and great ones in the likes of Ja [Fallon], [Michael] Donnellan and [Padraig] Joyce whereas the only time we've had a player approaching that standard was probably Ciaran [McDonald] in '04."

Ray Silke suspects Mayo were lacking something else.

At a team meeting before the 1999 Connacht final he told his teammates that if they got out of Tuam with a win, there was an All Ireland opening up for them. If Mayo won, it would be their last of the season. It was, in a nutshell, the tale of two counties. The expectancy of the Mayo public was Mayo's biggest obstacle to an All Ireland. Mayo were Galway's. Even in his dig at them, Silke was paying his rivals a compliment.

He could pay them more.

Anthony Tohill once commented that the problem with Ulster was that teams were going out not to lose. Silke maintains that what made Galway-Mayo such a regular spectacle was basic achievement-motivation theory. The greater your desire to win, the less your fear of losing, the better you and the game would be.

"The joke here now is that Galway need either a Mayo manager or captain to win an All Ireland. If you look at, say, the Cork-Kerry rivalry, there's much more cutting in the humour. With GalwayMayo, it's not as bitter and that's reflected in the football. Players like Ja and McHale just played for the joy of playing. But I think that you're seeing less and less of that freedom now. Last week in Castlebar, Brian Dooher played most of the game at centre-back. I know Donnellan used to drop back as well but not anything as systematically as Dooher; it was just the kindred spirit he was, getting the ball of our full-back line and then zooming up the field. But now you have Connacht players playing like Dooher."

Carney has noticed it too.

Maybe it's because Peter Ford is now coaching against his native county. "He knows the Mayo players, the Mayo psyche and how best to play against them. The result is, I think, this league semi-final will be attritional. There's a little bit of history since last summer's Connacht final when Mayo felt they were ambushed by the way Galway played. The blanket defence and gang tackling; they weren't expecting to meet it outside Croke Park."

The boundaries have changed. Ulster had come to Connacht. As a result, Mayo went to Ulster for a coach.

The pragmatist in McHale accepts they had to. "Galway and Mayo both have aspirations of winning the All Ireland and the reality is straight-up defending no longer seems to do that.

When Maurice Sheridan played with Mayo, he was living with Paul Clancy. Now you're not going to stand on his head when he's your roommate. And maybe that's been what's wrong with Mayo. We've definitely been too nice. We've never gone into a big game where there hasn't been a question about the bravery or heart of some player. Even in '96 and '97 when we were a big physical team, we wouldn't go to the boundary of the law. The McGeeneys do, and they're right. When a fella is soloing too high, you have to let him have it.

"The teams that are winning All Irelands are intimidating, especially around the middle. Even if you win the kick-out, you're going to absorb punishment. In the past some of our lads have been hit so hard in the first 15 minutes they've thought, ?Maybe someone else will get that ball and then I'll go to link onto it.' That's why Alan Dillon is one of my favourite players. He won't back down to anyone. Look at last year's All Ireland quarter-final; he tormented Seamus Moynihan. But with 15 minutes left against Dublin, Mickey [Moran] had to take him off.

You need fellas who'll sacrifice themselves and their minutes to play that kind of game."

Over in Galway, Walsh shares a wary optimism. The forwards are good, very, very good. But are they going to change their way again just to beat Mayo? In the All Ireland quarter-final against Cork, Galway were, as he puts it, "handed two goals like we were never handed before" and still lost. Where was the grit from the Connacht final, as ugly as it occasionally was?

In the past it was Mayo who tended to be the Stop Galway Movement. In '05 it was as if Galway never aspired to doing more than stopping Mayo. For one more day though, maybe that's not a bad thing. Mayo, in a way, have more to lose today.

Carney and McHale agree.

The FBD Connacht final defeat in February was a bigger dent in the team's psyche than the three-goal defeat to Dublin in Parnell Park.

"You never want to lose to Galway twice in the one year, " says McHale. "Whether it's February, April or July, it makes no difference."

These days, neither does how you win.