Kevin Hughes and Brian McGuigan had been through a lot together. They won All Irelands together, partied together, and last year shared an apartment in Sydney together. It was strange seeing Brian in that hospital bed, putting on a brave face. Last year they were both in Australia but Brian still got to play for Tyrone; now they're both back home and McGuigan will be the one watching on. Both knew though that the injury was relative.

McGuigan's father nearly died when he broke his own leg. Hughes' brother Paul was killed in a car crash, then his sister Helen was killed in another. In a way that's why McGuigan and Hughes headed to Australia in the first place.

Kevin adored Paul. As a teenager Kevin was known as the best hurler in the area. It had been Paul's idea to put a team together by getting a few boys from Eglish and the other nearby parishes to chip in with their own lads in Killeeshil. He managed Kevin's under-16 football team too. At 22 he was already club secretary; how could you not but admire him? Paul didn't let on how fond he was of Kevin though.

Not until the end anyway. Six days before Paul Hughes crashed on his way from coaching his under-16 team to watching a senior game in Eglish, Kevin Hughes came off the bench in Croke Park in an All Ireland minor semi-final, dragged Tyrone back into it, and in the closing seconds threw a ball out to Mark Harte for the equaliser.

"Paul's friends were going to stay in Dublin that night, " Hughes recalls, "but he said, 'No, I want to get up the road to see our boy.' Before, Paul would just find critical things about you. You know what brothers are like; they never really say that you're doing well or nothing. When I met him that night he gave me a big hug and said that he was proud of me. That was the first time and only time he had ever said it.

I knew he always probably thought it, but he never would have expressed it.

I just think it's weird then that a week later he was gone, as if it was a sign or something. You know, the fact he came back home that night to say that."

Paul would have been proud of him the week after his death too. In that epic semi-final replay in Parnell Park against Kerry, Hughes put on possibly his greatest ever underage performance.

"That week, Mickey [Harte] and Father Gerard [McAleer] had said to me, 'If you don't want to play, no one can blame you.' But the football sort of took my mind off it. I knew Paul would have wanted me to play because he knew Gaelic is what I loved doing."

Four years later tragedy struck again, this time a month after another All Ireland final. Helen Hughes was at the bar in the hotel the night of that under-21 win in Sligo, exchanging one-liners and laughs with her younger brother. It was and is hard to fathom how someone so full of life would later be so still.

"What happened to Helen, it just brought it [Paul's death] all back, " he says in that soft, calm voice of his. "You don't understand it, why it should happen twice. It's the worst thing that can happen to anybody. You never recover from it, you just learn to live with it. It was worse on me Ma and Da. They found it all very hard to take. Me? I just had to get on with it."

That he did. Two years later he was pivotal in Tyrone's All Ireland semi-final win over Kerry to the point where Darragh O Se claims his toughest-ever opponent hasn't been Walsh, McGrane or Whelan but Hughes. Then he was Man of the Match in the final.

Winning Sam, Hughes says, "was everything I ever thought it would be". He savoured the moment. One of Mickey Harte's abiding memories of those celebrations was Hughes' beaming face on the podium in Omagh, donning a big hat in keeping with a tradition developed from the underage days. One of this writer's is of Hughes, McGuigan and Owen Mulligan after the GOAL game on the Wednesday, driving out of Healy Park, all with one arm out the window and the other holding a can. Hughes smiles at the memory and the charge.

"I suppose in Tyrone, people would have that opinion, that I'd be one of the ones to party. I do, after a job is done, like to enjoy it. That's a big thing with me. Since Paul's death I've gone out with that attitude. Life's too short.

You have to enjoy winning and celebrating it at the time because you don't know if it's ever going to happen again, or what's around the corner."

It's an outlook that's been reinforced by what was around the corner. One morning the following February he called his employer, former team sponsor Willie John Dolan, on his way to work to see if there was anything to this crazy rumour about Cormac McAnallen. A few days later Hughes was standing up in Paudge Quinn's Corner, only a few hundred metres from where Paul and Helen had both been killed, and told his teammates a brutal truth. "You're going to think I'm mad here but you've just got to move on."

There were times though when Hughes found it impossible to take his own advice. Himself and McAnallen often played midfield together, roomed together. The stunning reality would hit Hughes at the most inopportune times.

"I tried to approach that year like I had when Paul died. Because the more you think about them, the harder it gets; you have to occupy yourself in other ways, like football. But in the heat of the championship, you can only block things out for so long. You always end up looking back at what happened. I don't know if it was a factor for the other boys but for me personally the day of the Mayo game, it was. I always knew that year that I would be going away but that day leaving Croke Park I sort of thought, 'This could be my last game in a Tyrone jersey.' I was just fed up." Football could only be a refuge for so long.

He had always wanted to get away.

Now he had to.

He had a whale of time during his year away. He flew Down Under in January with some clubmates, spent the first five weeks going up the east coast before working for a few months in Sydney. He played a bit of football there too alongside McGuigan for the Cormac McAnallen club founded by Eamon Eastwood from Coalisland. It was "special", he says, "for them and for us" to have two colleagues of Cormac's playing for the club in its first year. Then the night they played in a league final, Hughes got talking in the bar to two opponents, Darren Magee and Colm Parkinson. They were heading to America; from that Hughes got the idea of going there himself. The McAnallen club couldn't play in the Sydney championship while he had enjoyed his time playing for the Ulster club in San Francisco in 2000. Shortly after his now fiancee Teresa finished her exams in Jordanstown, they headed to San Francisco where he worked as a site engineer and lived with the club chairman.

He liked the vibe around by the Haight-Ashbury district and Martin Mac's bar. "There were some characters over there. Hippies, bikers, freaks;

if you wanted to see it, you'd see it there." He didn't "bother much" with that scene though. More often than not, he stayed with the Irish one, and more particularly, the football one.

He couldn't get away from it. More, he didn't want to get away from it. Ask him what the highlight of the whole year was and he'll simply say, "Winning the North American championship" alongside Down's Dan Gordon, Brendan McVeigh, John Clarke and Joe Doran. Watching Tyrone on the big screen in the early hours was special too.

"At the start of the year I didn't miss it. Even when Brian went back just before the Down game, I was like, 'Nah, not interested'. I had been eight years going non-stop. As the year went on I definitely missed it. Especially the time of the Dublin games.

Eighty thousand in Croke Park. I had been there before and anybody who plays football knows that's the place you want to be. It was tough to watch and it was great to watch, you know?

We got back to Sydney the Thursday before the All Ireland and watched the final there. It was great now, all the Down and Tyrone ones cheering on the Ulster sides. I didn't know until then just how much football meant to people over there." Including possibly himself.

He has no regrets though. About going over in the first place, about not coming back and forth like McGuigan did.

"Before I went, Mickey had mentioned about coming back in May but I had made up my mind that I wanted to go and stick it out for the year and get the travel thing out of my system for good. There was a chance I mightn't have got back out and lost the visa. It was a hard decision to make; obviously I lost out on another All Ireland. But I can now say I had a great year instead of looking back in ten years' time wondering what it would have been like."

He was back training with Tyrone within three days of getting back ("the cold air was tough to get used to; it really got to my chest") and playing in a McKenna Cup semi-final against Armagh three days later again. Then, before he knew it, he was in the middle of a melee in Omagh, the paper was saying he could get 24 weeks, and he was sitting in front of disciplinary committees for "bringing the association into disrepute".

"They showed us the video evidence, saying we were seen to have attempted to strike. I said, 'Where did you see any strike?' They just kept saying, 'Through that passage.' There was one time I put my arm across and stopped someone on the chest with an open hand. I think they accounted that as a strike. It was very frustrating, you know. Because you had people from the outside trying to say, 'You got sucked in, you got sucked in, that's what Dublin wanted' but if one of your players is on the ground and people are surrounding him, you can't just let him lie there, you have to let him out." Some powerful oratory from Harte and county board PRO Brendan Harkin helped him out. He's grateful.

"If I had missed those [league] games, there's no way I'd be ready for championship football, like." Now he wants to repay their loyalty with an All Ireland. The rest of the camp, he senses, are on fire with the idea too.

"Even that first night back, I couldn't get over the effort being put in. People could say, 'Back off, it's only the McKenna Cup, youse are just after winning the All Ireland.' But everyone on this Tyrone team really wants to win back-to-back titles, and, if we do, then go on and win another one. Obviously we got a major blow with losing Brian but that will be another factor now, to do it for Brian."

They might have lost one All Ireland final Man of the Match but they've another one back. Happy to be home, happy to be back driving that treacherous Ballygawley-Dungannon road to work for Willie John down in Monaghan ("Going anywhere at all, it seems I have to travel that road").

Happy knowing he's ready for whatever's next around the corner.