THEY start the season as they plan to live it and end it. Playing in finals like today, playing in a packed Croke Park like they will next Saturday. "If you come on to a Dublin squad, " Paul Caffrey said last year in a rare extensive interview, "you have to realise that come summer you're going to be playing in front of a full house in Croke Park." At this stage in Dublin's development, full houses and Leinster finals are routine. The challenge now is to find and cultivate players who can get Dublin playing in front of full houses in national finals.

It's part of the reason why there'll be such a draw to Tullamore today and next Saturday's date against Tyrone.

The Hill have all heard about Dermot Connolly's exploits with St Vincent's last autumn and with the county this past month, but this next six days gives most of them their first real chance to see the kid for themselves in blue and in the flesh. David O'Callaghan has never before really been afforded the necessary time or stage but now that opportunity knocks. Collectively too, the Dubs will be looking to make a stand, just like they unashamedly declared in Omagh last year, that the days of being pushed around were over.

As critical as the next six days are though, they can only be so much of a marker.

Dublin have beaten Tyrone in three of the last four leagues yet have ended below Mickey Harte's side in each of those campaigns. This year, that must change. Connolly and O'Callaghan both need extended runs in the side, regardless of whether they produce highlights under the floodlights next Saturday.

This league, Pillar has to blood players, he has to be patient and he has to win.

After Omagh last February, Dublin played three league games decided by a point or less. They didn't win any of them. They featured in one one-point game last summer too. When you're looking for reasons why Dublin ultimately came short last summer, you shouldn't overlook that they fell short in spring.

That defeat to Mayo has triggered a lot of soul-searching, think-tanking and theories in Dublin this past winter.

Some of the theories are valid, some are not. Mayo's will by the Hill was not the winning or losing of the match. It might have triggered great drama, boosted Mayo's confidence and affected Dublin's focus and routine, but Dublin regained their focus. Caffrey may have made switches to his team but most of them were made at half-time, and Dublin went on to outscore Mayo by eight points over the following 15 minutes. It was a change of mindset more than a change of personnel that invited Mayo back into the match.

Dublin's pre-match link of arms to the Hill and the size of their backroom team was also questioned, even mocked, after the capitulation last August. Caffrey always suspected it would.

"The day we are beaten, " he said in an interview published the morning of the Mayo match, "people will pick holes in it. They'll say there are too many faces, too many bodies, too many voices. It'll be criticised left, right and centre." Again, the critics are wrong. The team-building expert John Maxwell claims that one of the irrefutable laws of teamwork is the law of identity and Dublin will continue to abide by it; while applauding the Hill before every match might not be for you, the important thing is Dublin believe it works for them and that it binds and emphasises the cause and the collective.

Another is what Maxwell calls the law of Mount Everest. A few years before Tenzing and Hillary conquered Everest, a climber called Maurice Wilson attempted Everest with just three Sherpa guides. The guides quit, Wilson carried on alone. It was Tenzing and Hillary who found his body, prompting Hillary to say, "The size of your dream determines the size of your team." It is a principle that has served Tyrone, Armagh and the Cork hurlers well in recent years, and facilitated Dublin's hold of Leinster. With a match-day management team of 16 men, there is no questioning the size or nature of Caffrey's dream.

Some commentators have labelled his players as too robotic, a bunch of athletes more than footballers. To doubt the quality, whatever about the balance, of the Dublin attack is to lazily overlook how much the side progressed last year. They now have freetakers. They now have, in Alan Brogan and Conal Keaney, two legitimate 'go-to' forwards that every All Ireland-winning side since '97 have had. If there was a fault with the Dublin attack last year, it was that all six starting forwards were more inside forwards than half forwards, something which the emergence of the stylish Connolly should address.

At the back, Dublin have plenty of football too. While Kerry have been heralded as the champions and restorers of direct football since the reinvention of Kieran Donaghy, Dublin were the best foot-passing team in football last year. Against Laois in the Leinster semi-final, they kicked 36 footpasses into their forward line and won 26. Against Offaly, they made 42 footpasses into their forward line and won 29. It was Kerry half-forwards, not halfbacks, who kept feeding Donaghy. In the second half of his career, Seamus Moynihan fist-passed the ball 10 times for every once he kicked it.

With Dublin, Caffrey would be instructing him to pick out a wing forward and kick it. It takes football and footballers for Dublin to play that way.

Paul Curran can see that.

He can see how the team progressed last year and how Kerry, Tyrone and Armagh are likely to regress this year.

There is an All Ireland there for the rest of the pack, and Dublin, with the age profile and life of cycle of the team, should be the pick of that pack. But he's concerned.

"We have serious, serious problems in defence, " says Curran, player of the year when Dublin last won an All Ireland. "This past two years, when we've reached All Ireland quarter-finals and semifinals and played the likes of Tyrone and Mayo, we've been scoring 1-14 and 2-11, enough to win any game, but then we're conceding 2-18 and 1-16.

That's ridiculous. They're hurling scores. You can't win All Irelands like that. We're fine in Leinster against teams with a forward or two, but when you start meeting top five teams with four or five quality forwards, Dublin haven't enough backs to hold them."

The stats back him up. For the past five years Dublin's summer has been terminated by the four sides who've reached All Ireland finals during that period - Armagh, Kerry, Tyrone and Mayo.

With the exception of the Kerry game in '04, all were furious, enthralling games of football which Dublin contributed enormously to but ultimately they were decimated at the back. In those six games (Tyrone '05 involved a replay), the least Dublin conceded after half-time was 1-6.

While they've been averaging 1-12 themselves in those games, a quota, as Curran says, to win any game, they've been conceding 1-15. For such a trend to continue for so long smacks not so much of talent deficiency but tactical naivety.

It's obvious to Curran what Dublin must do. This spring shouldn't just be about trying out some new backs like Oliver Plunkett's Ross McConnell at full back. If needs be, new defensive systems should be toyed with. Find the backs or find the system.

"We have some very good footballers in the full-back line, " he says. "Paul Griffin is a class act. [David] Henry too, but in the new Croke Park, with all those wide open spaces, if your side is losing midfield, you're very vulnerable in there, no matter how good you are. Maybe it's time to look at bringing some half backs behind the ball and looking to break. I'd prefer not to see it but we need an All Ireland at this stage and it was how Armagh and Tyrone won them."

Elsewhere, everywhere, there's further room for improvement. As big as Caffrey's team and dream is, it didn't feature the performance coach, Liam Moggan, last year. Moggan was involved in '05, and has since helped Ken Doherty top snooker's world rankings. A mental trainer could have foreseen and planned for the complacency that allowed Mayo back into that semifinal. Individual players need to tweak their game. Conal Keaney is one of the country's most improved forwards, to the point he's now one of the country's best forwards, yet he is still too onefooted. If had he a right to go with that left, he'd have had another 1-1 to go with his 1-3 against Mayo last year.

Right now, they're as well positioned as anyone to win this year's All Ireland. The side has the right age profile, and after last August, enough hurt, hunger and experience.

It's a big year for Mark Vaughan, but even if he doesn't come through, either Connolly, O'Callaghan or Bernard Brogan should. They just need to get that bit more out of fellas, tighten up at the back and get back to making league semi-finals and finals.

This year they're on the right side of that crucial 4-3 home-and-away split, their four home games being against Tyrone, Cork, Fermanagh and Kerry. Dublin have always been able to register six to eight points every spring; it's how they've been one of only four counties who've avoided Division Two football since their last league final appearance in '99. Their problem has been winning that extra game, and hitting 10 or 11 points every league.

This year it's there for them. The league. Leinster.

Sam. The lot.