It's the final day of college for Conal Keaney. The grey light of lecture rooms has vanished for a few months and so has the nuisance of class presentations. His engineering books are shut and swapped for football boots. Thoughts are roaming towards running wild on Croke Park's green acreage. At last, he says.

He has missed it, he adds.

Out in the industrial haze of Sandyford, as he burns off the hours before the next gym session, Keaney throws his thoughts over beginnings of a similar kind.

Early last year he devoted himself to the Dublin football set up and so commenced a whole new chapter in his sporting life. Eyebrows were raised among Dublin's hurling community. Tears were shed. Keaney was a gift from the gods of the game, bestowed upon a county that truly cherished his hurling talents.

It was a painful divorce, but he stresses that his departure from inter-county hurling is not going to last forever. He simply had to make a choice . . . that was all.

Keaney was the last of a dying breed, a throwback to those days when it was possible to juggle two codes and still keep a life going on the side.

But times are changing, and between the pulling and the dragging something had to give.

"It was tough to let it go [the hurling] but it's the right decision for now, " he says.

Since he made that decision Keaney has been developing into the sort of forward that county managers dream about when they close their eyes at night. He has strength and versatility and he pockmarked last year's championship with points in every game. What's more, he's continued the trend this year. Of his five league starts he hasn't failed to hit the target, and if Dublin were looking for a front man to share the scoring burden with Alan Brogan, then they could have found that player in Keaney.

Put another way, there's been an undeniable upsurge in his form since he focused solely on the big ball.

"The thing is, there's no hiding place during the championship anymore. Croke Park can eat you up, so you have to be able to give the game your commitment, you have to put in that graft. I don't think anyone can play at the top level in both hurling and football these days because the amount of training you have to do for both is just unreal. The hardest part for me was getting the schedule right, dividing the time between the two. I'm not sure if there's a way to do that. I just couldn't keep the two going and since I made the decision I seem to be playing a bit better."

Maybe it was just a case of committing fully to one.

The flip side is that the hurling community will always wonder about the added marvels Keaney would have brought had he chosen the road less travelled and taken hurling on a solo run.

Though his sparkle as a hurler was spotted and appreciated early on, he played an important role in bringing the first under-21 football title to the city three years ago. The glow of that success, and the celebrations which followed, are fragments of time that will always remain with him.

On some level, the chance of further glory must have been there with him when he finally opted for football and realised that, come what may, he would always drag some baggage along with him.

"When I made the decision I was very wary of people saying that I wasn't good enough [to play at football's top level], that I should just go back to the hurling. You'd hear the odd remark coming from the Hill or you'd hear some of the opposition's supporters having a go. I think I proved last year that I can play at the top level so it's a matter of building on that this summer."

The summer. Somehow it's inexorably linked with the Dubs, and as long as they're involved the sun will hang over the capital. As ever, there's a little more pressure this year . . . for Dublin, and for Keaney. The Dubs carry the tag of Leinster champions, they're in the second term of Paul Caffrey's reign, and for Keaney, as he says, it's time to keep his own juggernaut advancing.

"I don't feel any more expectation on me this year, but you always want to improve. I've got a bit more confidence now, though. Taking the frees helps.

You're always in the game. If you're not getting scores from play and then you get an easy free, then it gives you a lot more confidence. An easy free is worth two or three points, especially to me, confidence wise."

In four weeks Keaney will get his first test in the tight confines of Pearse Park with Longford lying in wait.

Against the same opponents Dublin used the open spaces of Croke Park to devastating effect last year and ran off with a 19-point victory. Really, it was a result that helped neither of the teams involved, and Keaney reckons it will be a different story come 4 June . "Longford wouldn't have been happy with last year. The scoreboard didn't do them credit and we're going to have to be careful going down there. We'll have to treat it as a final."

Keaney plundered 1-4 in that Longford tie last year and in some ways it put in motion what was to follow for him during the remainder of the championship. That he has a Leinster medal to show for those exploits of last season is a reward of sorts, but there are bigger prizes to plunder.

"It was of huge importance to win Leinster, especially as it was Pillar's [Caffrey] first year. You just want more though, you want it again and again. On our league results you could say we're fourth or fifth in the country or what have you, but that's not good enough. It's later in the championship that everything counts. It's then that the small things will change your year."

He knows it could have been different in 2005. The rub of the green. A shift in the wind. An All Ireland final . . . or even better, an All Ireland medal . . . might have given some tangible explanation to the choice that he made. But really, Keaney needs to justify things to nobody.

"You've got to set yourself challenges, and mine was to see if I could make it at the top in football. The day will come when I'll go back to hurling. At the moment I don't exactly know when that will be. It won't be this year and that's all I know for now."

So off he goes in search of a new training programme that he'll put to use at the gym later on. You wonder if those engineering books are already back on the top shelf gathering dust. Probably. He has other things on his mind now. One term finishing, and a season begins.