It's been part of the story of summer since 1992. It was only last week, when pressed often and at length that Moynihan gave the broad sweep of his football days any real thought. The lead in to an All Ireland final, you see, tends to elicit nostalgia from the public and the press. "Fourteen years Seamus. . ." somebody reminds him again, "A lot of changes in the game since you started."

Back when he played his first senior game for Kerry, in the famous loss to Clare, he shared the last day of one of Kerry's great men. As Clare whooped and hollered all over the Gaelic Grounds, Jack O'Shea was putting his boots away in the corner of the dressing room, speaking about football and the urge to play and savour it for as long as possible. Moynihan, 18 years old, was listening and storing away what he heard.

Before he sat the Leaving Cert in St Brendan's that year, Kerry manager Mickey Ned O'Sullivan contacted him to say he was set for a call up once the exams had finished. For a fortnight, Moynihan trained with the seniors and O'Sullivan had seen enough to decide he was ready to be thrown in at the deep end of a Munster final.

As Kerry sank that afternoon in Limerick, Moynihan stayed afloat. Afterwards, amid the rubble of defeat, there were claps on his back and whispers in his ear. He was told there were acres of years ahead of him for Munster medals and All Irelands and success was waiting around the next turn. It was a given, they said. After all, this was Kerry, where expectation is part of genetic make up.

But the prophets were wrong and it was only after his fifth Munster campaign in 1996, that Moynihan finally collected provincial honours.

Lean years and halted progress, but still, he's now only six games from Kerry's record for championship appearances. It's an accolade held by Dan O'Keeffe who kept goal for the county from 1931 until he retired in 1948, at the age of 42. That Moynihan has come within breathing distance of such a record during the game's most intensive period, points to ferocious desire and devotion. The appetite is intangible and comes from within but there are explainable, external reasons behind the dedication that has laced his playing days.

It was beneath the angled shadows of the Cathedral in Killarney, on the fields of St Brendan's College, that football became part of the routine. "It was put into the diary in St Brendan's, " he says.

"Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday after school. If your bus was leaving at four o'clock, that was your problem. No excuses. You didn't miss training." When those evenings had finished, he'd carry his bag of books and his bag of gear through Killarney and hitch a ride home. "Sure it would only take two minutes to get a lift. Missing the bus? It was a small price to pay."

Not long before he saw Jack O'Shea leave the intercounty stage, he helped St Brendan's collect the Hogan Cup, the senior colleges championship, for the second time in it's history.

Behind the success were Fr Jim Kennelly and Fr Larry Kelly, brother of Sean, former GAA president. "Fr Jim is from Ballydesmond in Cork, but he's got a great gra for Kerry football. And Fr Larry is the same. The structures they had in place were unreal and the discipline began there, in the Sem [St Brendan's]. That structure made it easier when you made the jump to the higher level. You fell into the routine of Kerry training a lot easier."

When Fr Kelly brings his mind back a decade and a half and goes into the stash of memories labelled 'Moynihan', one in particular jumps to his tongue. "He played senior with the Sem for four years but in the semi-final against St Peter's of Wexford [in 1992] he dominated completely. Nothing passed him that day. He stopped every attack they had."

It was the first sign that Moynihan was emerging as the Cadillac of modern day defenders. The path isn't mapped out though and nobody hands you a compass and a flashlight to show the way. Longevity depends on the speed of learning. "January can be an awful month if you come back to training in bad shape, " Moynihan continues. "It can be the most lonesome place. If you're a stone overweight then nobody has sympathy for you. Every session is cruelty.

You can't even enjoy the football matches at the end. One winter, I came back in bad shape and I swore I'd never do it again. Never. You learn the hard way."

It's strange how each season untangles itself. Back in early April of this year, one day after his son was born, Seamus Moyhihan was roaming the grass of Fitzgerald Stadium against Dublin, his first game for Kerry all year. Michael McCarthy had injured his hand and when the call came from Jack O'Connor, Moynihan juggled in his head the events of the coming weekend. Had the sequence of things dictated otherwise, he wouldn't have played that Sunday. He was grateful to fate for the opportunity to take part and knows it's not like two or three years back when his place on the team was guaranteed.

"If I didn't get that chance [against Dublin], who knows?

I'd have been sitting on my backside for a good few games, that's for sure. I might still have been sitting there.

A lot of people have said my last couple of years haven't been fantastic but it certainly wasn't from the lack of trying."

Weeks before the Dublin game, speculation lingered like a cloud over the Kingdom that Moynihan was about to put his county boots away. On top of the exits of Dara O Cinneide and Liam Hassett, the loss of the Glenflesk man would have evaporated much of the old experience from the team.

As the county pondered life without Moynihan, he was training away by himself and focused on a spring return.

There were no doubts.

"It was never an issue that I wouldn't come back this year, " he says now. "Absolutely not. I had a lot of things going on at the start of the year. I was building a house; my son was due in April. I had a lot of things in the pot.

Jack [O'Connor] wasn't overly worried I'd be missing games at the start of the league. But obviously he was anxious I come back as soon as I could. It's not like a light bulb . . . you can't just switch it on."

Though Kerry were racking up big scores and easing past opponents when this year's championship was still covered in a film of dew, Moynihan sensed the team were struggling to move up a gear. It happened against Waterford and it happened against Tipperary and then Cork came to Killarney and were expected to roll over and obey. "It was a game we could have won by a point and it was a game we could have lost by seven, " he says.

The replay brought defeat for Kerry and the conspiracy theorists were basking in the fallout. So much has come to pass since, it already seems like a different year.

"We went out to win a Munster title and that didn't happen. But sometimes when you get a kick in the backside, you can either throw yourself in the corner or you can try and bounce back and do something about it. Thankfully, everyone involved went for the latter. If we didn't do that we could have been tattooed by Longford and eaten alive by Armagh. Simple as that. What changed after the Cork replay was the attitude.

That's been the major difference since then."

Kerry have settled. The results have followed. Kieran Donaghy has emerged to take some of the frontal heat and Moynihan, as usual, directs traffic and drags possession from the wreckages around midfield.

Next Sunday brings his sixth All Ireland final, the coming week the sixth he's spent in quiet preparation for the chaos that lies ahead.

"People say when you're younger that there's less pressure, but for big games it's always there. My first All Ireland was 1997 against Mayo and there was a lot of pressure on Kerry to deliver then. Mayo had beaten us the previous year in the semi and Kerry hadn't won an All Ireland in 11 years. We were expected to go up [to Croke Park] and come back with awards. Just look at this year, all the games we've played this year . . . they've been pressure cauldrons."

Pressure. The big day.

Croke Park in the autumn and Moynihan once more on the Brodaway stage. When the curtain comes down on this year, on this era of football, we'll be thankful for the part he played.

tjflynn@tribune. ie