There he was in the middle of the latest nightmare, pacing like a lion in the muddied goals of Parnell Park with a cloud of angry steam darting from his nostrils. A scatter of green, white and gold in the crowd and that was about the best part of it.

No point collapsing before a few thousand from home and having the story of this week's breakdown reach the pubs of Offaly before the team bus is even pointed for Tullamore.

Fifty two minutes of wintry football had come and gone before they registered a score in Dublin that Saturday night.

Fifty two minutes. He remembers the feeling and still shakes his head. "Horrible, " he grimaces.

When the game was done with, nobody lingered. The autopsy could wait. In a few minutes the dressing room was emptied and their backs were turned to the battlefield, a chalked-out line already being drawn around the corpse of the Offaly team.

It didn't matter that Ciaran McManus stole a hat-trick in the final quarter to give a coat of respectability to the result. They already knew they were heading for home bruised and conquered.

The following week, newspapers all over the country carried photographs of the scoreboard just before the hour mark. 1-10 to nothing.

It was the score Offaly took back with them; the image they tattooed behind their eyelids.

"That was the stock of Offaly football last March - we were down that low. After that we asked ourselves, players and management, what the f**k are we doing here?

Are we going to continue wasting our time or are we going to do something about it? We knew we weren't that bad but still we knew we had created a certain badness ourselves. We talked about the game in training and there was no finger pointing because we all had our own howlers. Since then, an awful lot of effort has been put in on all sides and we've knuckled down. We've worked hard to try and get things right."

It didn't happen overnight and eventually they would slide from Division One, but when the championship dawned, they brought a direct and goal hungry approach with them. Day One against Westmeath was publicly denounced as a dull, stale encounter but that didn't bother Offaly. They laid a few ghosts to rest, recorded a badly needed win in Croke Park and gained momentum which took them all the way to a Leinster Final, their first in nine years.

Two weeks later, Kelly isn't sure how Dublin managed to edge past them so easily when it mattered. He just remembers the game drifting from them, slowly and painfully.

"It finished double scores and we were big-time hurt.

Not alone being beaten but a margin of nine points. . . it's a sign of humiliation. It's not about claiming moral victories and getting close to teams at this stage, but we weren't nine points off Dublin. They weren't that far ahead of us."

Kelly was one of a handful to have lived through a Leinster Final day. During the fortnight before the game he recalled 1997 and discussed the expected noise levels with his back-line. Together they devised ways of communicating efficiently, but no amount of planning could override the drum of commotion that surrounded them.

In the second half Dublin had a free kick from just outside the 21. Two forwards had managed to break loose from their markers and positioned themselves on the edge of Kelly's penalty area. A Dublin goal looked ominous but the howls from the Offaly goalkeeper never reached his defence. After the game it dawned on Kelly that the only way of getting the attention of his full-back line was to throw a water bottle in their direction and hope it made contact.

"In Croke Park, when there's a full house and especially against Dublin, a fellow could be five yards in front of you and you're screaming as loud as you can, but he still can't hear you."

He had prepared for it though. The days before the Dublin game, Kelly fixed himself on a particular routine.

He works as a sales representative for Kilsaran Concrete, just outside Tullamore, and his days are filled with short-haul journeys throughout the county. In the morning he listened to the radio for an hour and then, as the 10 o'clock news was beginning, the radio was switched off and his mobile phone was turned to mute. For 60 minutes he drove to his next destination in total silence in order to familiarise his mind with the laconic environment.

"Standing in front of the Hill on your own for 35 minutes, you have to block everything out. You have to hear nothing and tuning out isn't as difficult as you'd think. You just have to train yourself.

Croke Park can be an easier place to play than O'Connor Park or O'Moore Park, because those places can echo. You'll hear some young lad or his father behind the goal saying 'Kelly, ya useless bollix, you're nothing but a waster.'" Not long after Dublin had copper-fastened their hold on Leinster, O'Moore Park was beckoning again. Offaly were plucked from the draw, paired with Laois and the whole country thought they had the short straw. That's not how they looked on it.

Laois are neighbours, adversaries. The game brings its own sparks and tales and togging off for training with the taste of defeat still on their lips, it wasn't too difficult to find some motivation.

Far better than meeting a team where's there's no history of rivalry, reckons Kelly.

The game stokes plenty of fresh memories, too. Like last year and that goal Ross Munnelly smuggled through the crowd in injury time.

Offaly had led for all but the final moments of the game and defeat provided another slice of misery to heap on the list.

Then there was 2003. Kelly wasn't between the sticks for that one because by then he'd grown disillusioned with football and goalkeeping. He watched the game with sleep in his eyes from a bar on McLean Avenue, the main drag of south Yonkers, New Yo r k .

The previous Christmas he checked his form and his desire for the game and decided a break was in order.

His performances for club and county had nosedived.

He couldn't catch a ball, couldn't stop it. Couldn't even kick it out of his way. It was obvious: he had to take flight.

"Wild horses wouldn't hold me back. I wasn't enjoying football and I needed to get out of Offaly."

He knew if he stayed around and took a sabbatical, he'd find himself part of the set-up by spring time. When training began he'd be herded up and talked around and if this happened his love for the game could have left him for good. "Football-wise I was on the slide. I was playing terrible stuff. I thought I can either keep going down or I can pull the pin, so I needed a reason to get away from football and by Chrismas [of 2002] I had my mind made up. New York. I suppose it was a selfish decision to go away but if I didn't I felt I would have been finished with football."

He found a job behind the mahagony counter of Muldoon's, a blue-collar bar in Manhattan, just around the corner from Grand Central station. He settled easily into city life. Offaly and football were put to the back of his mind. Weekends were his own and he divided his time between Gaelic Park and Yankee Stadium and fed his desire for American Football and Golf in between.

It was the 100th anniversary of the World Series and when the Yankees made the finals, Muldoon's transformed into a loud beery wave of expectation. In between popping caps of cold beer and mixing the odd cocktail, Kelly watched the Florida Marlins rip the Yankees apart with perfect pitching and he joined in the solemnities when it was all over.

That's what he took from the summer, not the memory of Offaly falling by two points in a replay to Laois.

During his time away, though, he never lost touch with the team and with a new season approaching, the calls for him to return home increased. He'd have liked another year in New York but his appetite for the fields of Ireland was coming back.

He touched down the Friday morning before St Patrick's Day, exactly a year since he had left. A few hours later he was training with Offaly.

Within a few weeks they secured promotion and maybe, at last, the old tales of catastrophe and mishap that followed them through the new millennium were going to be put to bed. But then came Westmeath in Leinster and another last gasp defeat.

The wind was sucked out of them again.

All the bad times came flooding back, like the game against Kildare in 2000 when Kelly came from the goals and pinged a perfect freekick that looked to have won the game for Offaly. Somehow, though, the wind swirled and the ball died and the gods of football had betrayed them again.

Sick of it? Of course he is.

"All this hard luck talk that goes around, it's all bullshit.

That's why you ask yourself sometimes 'am I wasting my time here?' Yeah, we might get to win the first game or the second game and then maybe we'll get beaten by a point the third day out. And then you'll hear it: 'ah, ye were unlucky, the ref rode ye'. It's bullshit. Forget Leinster now. We can't put right the Leinster Final of 2006, but we can get to the 2006 quarter finals. Maybe we left it [the Leinster title] after us, maybe the day got to us, maybe a whole load of things.

But we're still in this. We're going to be giving it everything to get back to Croke Park."

A dozen years ago, as a kid of 18, he wore the Offaly jersey for the first time. He couldn't have seen the crests and hollows that were before him back then, but he's learned plenty on the way.

He knows Offaly have it in them to reach the top eight, that they won't roll over for anyone.

He knows, too, it's got nothing to do with luck. It's the way you play the game.