BEFORE one can remember Killarney one must first remember Thurles three years earlier.

Richie Stakelum, who'd watched the match from the New Stand, was among the horde of Tipperary supporters trudging out the Nenagh road in their heartbroken hundreds afterwards. A warm afternoon, the tramp of feet, rising dust, whispers of voices. "Like a death march. You couldn't hear a sound." The Stakelums arrived back at the car, pointed it for Borrisoleigh and turned on the radio to hear John Fenton being interviewed by Miche�l � Muircheartaigh.

"Can we now say that Tipperary are back?"

Miche�l asked.

"No, " replied Fenton, not twisting the knife for the sake of it but not sugar-coating it either.

"Not until they win a Munster final."

Stakelum winced at the bluntness of the reply, then nodded at its perfect truthfulness.

Until they won a first provincial title since 1971, Tipp wouldn't be back.

Three years later they were. On 19 July 1987, the evening Richie Stakelum stood up in Fitzgerald Stadium and told Ireland that the famine was over.

It was about four o'clock in the afternoon, mid-October 1986, when the door of the flat off Dorset Street in Dublin opened and Babs Keating - former Tipperary star, new Tipperary manager and not a man for knocking on doors and waiting to be admitted - suddenly materialised out of thin air. "Get your gear, " he instructed Richie Stakelum.

"What for?" a baffled Stakelum responded.

"Just get in the car." He got in the car.

Off they went to the Phoenix Park, where Babs produced his own hurley and proceeded to have a puckaround with his captain. In between every few pucks, Babs talked. Espousing theories, outlining plans, informing Stakelum what he expected from him. How he wanted the Borrisoleigh man to provide leadership from wing-back as well as captaincy, how he wanted him to attack the ball and how, because half-backs should take more control of the sliotar, he wanted him to catch it as often as he could. On dropping his passenger back to Dorset Street, Babs tossed the popstick-eyed Stakelum a bag containing a dozen Cummins sliotars ("I don't think I'd ever seen a dozen sliotars together before") and told him to go off and practise with them.

"Make sure you're able to put over the seventies the day of a Munster final, " was the parting shot.

Velvet glove, iron fist.

That was the thing with Babs, Stakelum reflects now. There was always a sting in the tail. While he made the Tipperary players feel good about themselves, he simultaneously made sure they realised there was no such thing as a free lunch. The phrase, "The day of a Munster final in front of 60,000 people?" would become a mantra.

And, thanks to the money raised by the Supporters Club, a cause Stakelum soon saw Tipp folk were only too willing to contribute to once Babs had reassured them that the cash would be going straight onto the players' backs rather than into servicing the Semple Stadium debt, make them feel good about themselves he did. The blazers and trousers and white shirts and Tipperary ties. The stops in Johnstown to get new hurleys from Pat Delaney. Representatives from Adidas and Puma turning up in Semple Stadium to kit them out. The weekend in London. After training each night they were "fed like gamecocks":

chicken, steak, salmon, water. The weekend they met Kerry in the opening round of the championship in Killarney they stayed in the Aghadoe Heights, a five-star hotel. Think champagne and you drink champagne.

In a county on its knees spiritually, administered by a county board on its knees financially, everything was different to what they'd been used to. Everything.

Different from the nights Ken Hogan had had to go behind the goal and up the steps of the Town End terrace to retrieve one of the handful of sliotars they were training with. Different from the night Bobby Ryan had asked for more fried chicken and beans on his styrofoam plate in Hayes's Hotel and was promptly chewed out by the waitress for his temerity. The late Dr John Keating became a regular at training sessions. One evening he took a look at Stakelum, decided the player was anaemic and prescribed iron supplements. "Now whether they were iron supplements or calf nuts or calf bullets was immaterial. All I was thinking was, 'Hey, someone cares'. It was all a measure of the faith Babs had in us. And, of course, it could easily have fallen on its face."

It didn't. For the captain, the hammering of Clare in the Munster semi-final replay marked the first palpable tremor in the ground beneath them. After the drawn provincial decider Babs told the players that they now knew how good they were and that they'd close the deal the next day. Half-time in the replay, with Tipp trailing Cork by five points, may have been the manager's finest moment, according to Stakelum.

"Babs was great. He was empathetic. No roaring and shouting at us to get up off our arses and do something after all they'd given us. 'Each and every one of you, ' he said, 'go out and do your best.' And it got through to us. We knew we had plenty of time to put things right." That Tipp were younger, fresher and hungrier than a Cork team going for a provincial six-in-a-row is obvious now but didn't seem so obvious then. "Youth and hunger can be seen as callowness, as lacking in street cred and not knowing how to win. Our youth and hunger did become evident during the second half of extra-time. But not until then."

Stakelum can still see Nicky English careering through with the last ball of the game, and is still struck by the maturity "this goalscoring assassin" demonstrated in choosing to take his point. In extra-time, John Fenton finally missed a free, the equivalent of Homer nodding. As if sensing that the hour was at last nigh, Tipp kicked on. Michael Doyle scored two goals.

Donie O'Connell got through for the clincher.

The dam burst and a million tears flowed through the wreckage.

On the sideline, Babs embraced with Michael Lowry, the county chairman. Among the pitch invaders was that year's star minor John Leahy, making a beeline for his hero Nicky English. The sheer theatre of the afternoon rendered it an occasion that would always be remembered and never be bettered. "The middle of summer. In Kerry. The sun going down. A match won in extra-time. After a replay. Against Cork. 4-22 to 1-22. You couldn't write it better."

For the record, the opening line of Stakelum's acceptance speech wasn't rehearsed. "The famine is over? It just seemed the natural thing to say. I might as easily have said that the drought was over." Also for the record, Stakelum was at home in bed by 10pm on the Monday night, too exhausted from the exertions and emotions of Killarney to stay up celebrating.

His hour atop Everest was followed by a slow retreat down the mountain. Ineffective in the All Ireland semi-final against Galway ("the match got away from me completely"), he insists nevertheless that Tipp, far from getting caught up in the post-Munster hype, were simply beaten by a better and more experienced side, one that would win the next two All Irelands. "Look, we lost a classic by a few points to a very good team with a fantastic halfback line. If we really had taken our eye off the ball, Galway would have beaten us out the gate."

A series of injuries accelerated Stakelum's descent, although he did pick up his All Ireland medal as a sub in 1989. Not playing better against Galway in 1987 remains his one big regret; on the other hand, his personal coda to Killarney proved a useful lesson in life skills. "A lifetime high followed by a bit of a low: you deal with it. And you learn to appreciate the good days a hell of a lot more." Babs made an approach to him to return to the fold in 1993 but by then Stakelum was settled in Stillorgan and married with a child. Life had moved on. He'd moved on with it.

Asked to engage in the wholly invidious exercise of naming three unsung heroes from 1987 and, after a moment's cogitation, he goes for Donie O'Connell with his "pure physical power" at centreforward; Pat Fox for the scores he sniped in English's shadow; and Seamus Gibson, the corner-back. Not an obvious choice, that last one, because Sharkey Gibson was an old-style member of the species who always seemed to finish the training runs on his knees. "But when the game was at its toughest in Killarney, Sharkey was tough. In no way stylish, but you earned your crust with him."

And then there was the management team.

Donie Nealon with his passion, Theo English with his astuteness and Babs, the once and perhaps future messiah. "You have to hand it to Babs. Two All Irelands, five Munster titles - his achievements as manager speak for themselves. Tipp haven't won an awful lot since, so I wasn't surprised he returned. There's a degree of frustration now in the county and probably a level of expectancy too. The pressure is on. But if anyone can deliver, there are not too many people better positioned than Babs."

Richie Stakelum wore the captaincy lightly and with dignity then. In a sense he still wears it now, 20 years on, and will do so for the rest of his life, permanently humbled by the number of people who continue to remember Killarney. Last night week, watching the Ireland-England rugby match in O'Dwyers in Kilmacud, he was approached by another customer. "You don't know me but I was there in Killarney, " the stranger announced. And yer man wasn't even a Tipp man but a native of west Limerick.

There isn't a week that goes by when Stakelum doesn't think of 19 July 1987 once or twice and "draw from that day in some shape or form, whether in business or personally". And all because he was not so much the right man in the right place as, he contends, "the lucky man in the right place.

Privileged."

The most privileged among the thousands of privileged Tipperary people in Killarney the day the famine ended.