Around 1997 and 1998, Tommy Lyons was actually one of the most popular managers in football, coaching probably the most popular team in football, and Malone personified the boldness and freshness of that team. Forever cool, forever fearless, forever young.

We haven't been fair to Roy Malone though.

We associate him with those spectacular runs when his coach with Rhode, Stephen Darby, first points to his capacity to win the "hard, dirty ball". We think of him as the model, urban socialite when he's a level-headed lad back living in Tullamore and out on the road selling concrete for Cemax. We see him as a year, when he's turned out to have a career, and for all the setbacks he's had to endure, that career goes on.

Today, two months short of his 31st birthday, he lines out for Rhode in the Leinster club final. Niall McNamee apart, no player has been as influential in getting Rhode to that final. While his career might never have recaptured the height or fulfilled the promise of '97-'98, it's probably been longer than we anticipated too.

Against UCD two weeks ago, all his skills were on display. The ability to win that dirty ball; to cut through the centre; to lay it off; and as his two points from play in a tight, low-scoring game underlined, the eye and foot to take a score. It was merely a typical, rather than an exceptional, Roy Malone performance for 2006 too. Never in his career has he played better or enjoyed his football more than he has this year. The irony . . . possibly even the cause . . . of it is that '06 has been his first year in a decade that he has not been involved with Offaly.

His last day with the county was the county's last day of 2005. Carlow beat them and minutes after that game in Dr Cullen Park, Malone let the manager Kevin Kilmurray know in front of the whole dressing room that they had reaped just what his preparation had sowed.

"It had been amateurish. The year before that, [under Gerry Fahey], the discipline was there, the training was tough, the drills were good, and we then went from that to what I and everybody else on the panel perceived to be a shambolic set-up. The week before the Carlow game, we had 11 guys togged out for training. The discipline all year had been shabby. Lads got away with poor excuses for missing training, there was no gameplan, nothing.

"I know all the lads agreed with me but I was the only one to put my neck on the line. After the stand [strike action] they had taken the year before, they didn't want to be drawing attention on themselves and criticise another management team, but I said what I said, and it probably hit home too much and I suppose I suffered the consequences."

He still followed Offaly closely last summer.

It wasn't just his county out that was out there; those were his friends out there. He kept in touch with them, heard things had improved if not to the standard they'd have liked, all the while watching them reach a Leinster final. "It broke my heart not to be involved, " admits Malone. He had spent the previous eight years trying to get back to a Leinster final.

Rhode's adventure didn't just ease the pain; it overrode it. "The last three years is the most enjoyment I've ever got out of football. It's maybe easy to say that now that I'm out of the county set-up, but I always got more enjoyment out of the victories with the club than I did with the county and the disappointments were always greater with the club too."

He had his share of them. Before they won the last three county finals, Rhode lost three finals. In the 2003 final, he was carried off in the opening minutes after tearing his posterior cruciate ligament. In the 2001 final he was team captain but was taken off, and as he'll say, "there was no injury that day". Malone was beginning to think county finals weren't for him and for Rhode.

Then Stephen Darby took over as team manager. Darby had been Malone's hero growing up. He remembers as a kid, "jumping up and down on the couch" when Darby was on the field to see his brother Seamus score the most famous goal in the history of football, and a few months later, running onto the field after the end of the '82 county final to greet his own father and Darby, wearing a small jersey with 'Stephen Darby' printed on it. Darby had been one of his first mentors and coaches with the club; now all these years later, he was back "expending more energy than lads doing the sprints and kicking the ball". That enthusiasm boosted Malone's, and with it, his confidence.

There would still be some setbacks. Last season Malone was continually hampered by a calf injury. Malone would try to rush back from it, and so, further damage it. "I finished up with a hole in my calf the size of my thumb."

This year he gave his body the proper rest, even if it meant missing training. "I hate missing training, especially at this age when you know you won't be playing forever."

He's played enough this past year for there to be calls for him to rejoin the county panel.

Kilmurray passed on that option. Pat Roe hardly will, though he has yet to take it up; he knows for now Malone has enough to be focusing on. And Malone has. Rhode, he says, is all he's thinking about.

But what if you were asked?

"I don't know. I don't know what way my body is, I don't know if it'd be up to county standard; I'm not 22 anymore. The way I am, if I was asked, I'd probably try it. Like, when I am I ever gong to do it again? I did miss it this year. If I thought I was able to compete at that level, if I could honestly say I'd be up to that pace, and I'd probably try it for one more year, but I don't. And to be honest, right now my priority is Rhode."

He's not concerned about how we perceive or remember him. Life's like that. It's a bit like Debra Veal, who rowed across the Atlantic from Tenerife to Barbados for three months on her own after her husband opted out two weeks into the challenge. A now hugely-popular speaker on the UK motivational circuit, she tells a joke against herself. A newspaper had a cut-out of her, with the bubble, "You know, someday it would be nice to remembered as something other than the woman whose husband left her in the middle of the Atlantic." Below the photo was the caption: Debra Veal, the woman whose husband left her in the middle of the Atlantic.

So it is with Malone. He'll forever be known for those two goals in the Leinster final and that photo shoot, but so what?

"It's intriguing, really, " he smiles. "People seem to think those things are the only things I've ever done. But it doesn't bother me.

That's just the way it'll be. I got a lot of slagging for that photo shoot but I'd do it all over again. Back then Offaly were doing extraordinary things at national level and the media at national level were interested in that. They're not really interested in Rhode winning three counties on the trot even though those three county finals brought me even more happiness than '97 or '98 with the county did."

Don't worry. Be happy. At least he'll forever be a time, at least he'll forever be someone.