Still, Kerry still didn't lack any confidence.

"We'd won Junior and Minor All Irelands in the years before that game, " recalls Sean Murphy from his home in Tralee, "and though we hadn't won a senior title in five years, we were familiar with success. We knew Mayo were the better team, but we had belief in ourselves, as all Kerry teams must."

Murphy is regarded as the best wing-back to grace the game and that semi-final on 12 August was the first day he started a championship game for the county. Eight years later, his display against Galway led to the decider being labelled 'The Sean Murphy Final'.

But in 1951, Mayo were already looking beyond that semi-final and had yet to even hear of Sean Murphy.

They had their radars fixed on Meath all summer. While the whole county still basked in its first All Ireland since 1936, their deep-thinking football men were musing interminably on Meath.

Mayo had succumbed to their Leinster rivals by two goals two years previous and the defeat stung terribly. Not only had the westerners a team depleted by emigration, they had their tactics all wrong and played into the hands of Meath by raining high ball into the full-forward line. It was gobbled up and digested easily by the Meath full-back Paddy O'Brien and, back home in Mayo, the year was seen as one in a series of All Irelands that had slipped like sand from their grasp.

"In '49, we threw the game away against Meath, " says Paddy Prendergast, Mayo's most respected fullback. "We must have had about 30 wides. It hurt to lose because we weren't right on the day."

Prendergast now lives in Tralee, close to Murphy, and has been there since the late '50's. "I've nearly got Kerry grass growing out of me at this stage."

He recalls that the league final of '51 gave rise to further incentive for Mayo. They lost again to Meath, missed a penalty and were undone by three points.

So, when Mayo looked at the All Ireland semi-final that year, they saw it as a catapult to a decider with Meath, a chance to atone for previous days. Kerry, they believed, were the obstacle blocking a shot at the real target.

Perhaps Mayo underestimated their opponents or maybe Kerry revelled beneath the tag of underdogs but, with minutes remaining, the Munster champions were ahead by five. Mayo supporters were already making for the train station when Tom Langan, who started on the wing, was moved to full forward. Mayo got a point but still the crowd edged for the exits. Then the game turned. Eamonn Mongey collected the resulting kick-out from the Kerry fullback Paddy Bawn Brosnan and when Mongey looked up Langan had stolen behind Brosnan. Mongey found Langan and Langan found the net.

The stadium heaved and erupted. Incredibly, Mayo were back in it. Seconds later, Paddy Irwin scored to level and that was it. The game ended 1-5 apiece.

"We were delighted to get away with a draw and we never expected Kerry to put up such a fight, " says Mongey. "It was the toughest game we ever played."

The replay was fixed for four weeks later, 9 September, but, as the Kerry team slipped away to their base at Barry's Hotel, day two was far from the minds of some. Kerry goalkeeper Liam Fitzgerald had a dog running in Shelbourne Park the night before. He promised the team if both his dog and Kerry found success, he would stand each one a bottle of whiskey. Duly, Fitzgerald's dog had won but Kerry only earned a second shot at Mayo and there were no provisions for a Kerry draw. Fitzgerald still bought enough whiskey at the Moy bar, close to Barry's, to make good on his word. The following day, with the train nosing through the midlands, Mayo and the replay wasn't even a consideration in certain parts of the Kerry carriage.

A few days later, word filtered to the Kerry players that a fortnight's collective training had been arranged for Ballyheigue. It was a strange choice of location.

Normally, the team would engage in collective training in Killarney but with a strong north Kerry presence among the county board, Ballyheigue was chosen as the place to prepare. As ever, politics was having its say.

"We stayed in Lawlors Hotel for the two weeks, " says Sean Murphy. "There was a big field out the back, a rough meadow as far as I can remember and it's there we trained."

Tim 'Roundy' Landers was in charge of Kerry, a soft-mannered man who didn't have the cut-throat attitude to keep a tight reign on some of the older, wiser players. Some supped pints in Lawlors with the Ballyheigue locals, others travelled through the villages of north Kerry each evening, singing and spinning yarns in the pubs to raise some money for a fishing boat for Paddy Bawn Brosnan.

Different times. Expenses were paid to those who travelled and at the end of the fortnight the coffers of the county board had received a roasting.

Mayo were also one of the few teams to openly embrace collective training at the time, and as Kerry ploughed through their days in Ballyheigue, Mayo were locked away in the midst of a more monastic schedule.

"We spent those couple of weeks in Gaughan's Guesthouse in Ballina and that's where we trained between the draw and the replay, " says Paddy Prendergast. "It was a fairly straightforward regime.

Jackie Carney and Gerard Courell were over the team at the time. They had us up for eight o'clock mass every morning, then it was back for a bit of breakfast and maybe a 20-mile round walk after that. Sometimes we nearly walked as far as Foxford. Then we'd rest and train for two or three hours with a bit of blackboard discussion on Kerry.

There was no going out at night. We'd stay in and play a few cards and talk about the match. We might have gone to the films once or twice at most."

Mayo won the replay. During those weeks in Ballina the players and their management discussed new ways to play the game. One of those was the use of early ball into open space. Before half time, Mayo had executed this plan to perfection and had snapped Kerry's defence like a fortune cookie. With the game in its infancy, Tom Langan picked up a ball on the wing and played it to the empty grass of Croke Park. Corner-forward Mick Flanagan pounced on it at speed and rattled the net. A few minutes later, the same duo produced the same move and Mayo, with Prendergast strong as whale bone, were on their way to that final with Meath.

Padraig Murphy, Sean's brother, was part of that Kerry team and also spent the preceding weeks training in Ballyheigue. Though Mayo were still considered favourites for the replay, there was acute disappointment among the team and supporters. "You'd nearly be half afraid of going back to Kerry, " he says. "Listowel race week wouldn't be the same and you'd have a noticeable air of despondency over the county."

Work had brought the Murphy brothers to Dublin, so it was a relief of sorts that they didn't have to face the huddled discontent of their countyfolk for a few weeks.

In the final two weeks later, Mayo finally scalped Meath and the county yelped with joy again.

As they were doing so, the lives of the Murphys and Paddy Prendergast were already moving on separate planes until all three would eventually wind up in Tralee.

Before that, because of Kerry and because of football, the Murphys were cast into new and wonderful worlds pebble-dashed with great characters. While still living in Dublin, the brothers were ferried to the corners of Ireland by a would-be German spy known as Kenny.

"This fellow was captured by the Germans and was parachuted into Clare to keep watch of submarine activity off the Irish coast, " says Padraig. "As he was parachuting in something went wrong with the landing and he broke his back. By the time he'd recovered, he was no use to the Germans as a spy, so he became a hackney driver."

With O'Connell Bridge as the pick-up point, Kenny drove the Murphys to league games and Kerry training in a car that could have been overtaken by a steamroller.

Those were matches and memories that informed all that came after them.

As the country whizzed by from inside the taxi, neither Sean nor Padraig could have predicted the diverging routes Kerry and Mayo football would take. Kerry went on to win three titles in the remainder of the '50s and famously, or perhaps infamously, the good times for Mayo came to an abrupt halt.

"Some of the best footballers I ever saw played for that Mayo team, " says Prendergast. "Sean Flanagan, Eamonn Mongey, Tom Langan. Great bloody footballers.

We should have won more All Irelands but after '51, maybe we got a bit blase. We were pushing it since '47 or '48 and having been involved that long maybe the enthusiasm or ambition isn't there. Looking back now you could argue that we could have won four All Irelands in that period."

The two they did win, though, had a profound effect on a county ravaged by emigration.

"Young lads were leaving Mayo every day and those wins in 1950 and 1951 lifted us up off our knees though. I remember coming out of Croke Park [having won the All Ireland] and seeing old men of 70 and 80 with tears running down their face. They had been waiting for 14 years to see Mayo win something.

It's not as long as the present people have waited, but back then 14 years was an awful long time."

Back then, perhaps time moved more slowly and 14 years felt like a generation.

Today though, 55 years must seem like an eternity.

tjflynn@tribune. ie