THEY'RE still here. Thirtyfive years on from when the helicopters started landing, 10 years on from the first All Ireland, and for that Margaret McConville stands tall and proud too.

She thinks back to the last time her Ois�n and the rest of the boys played a Kerry team. Laune Rangers, in Portlaoise, on "the wildest day you ever stood out" and "the boys grinded it out" by a point. Laune. �ire �g. Knockmore.

"Good teams, " she says, "we've beaten along the way. You don't hear of them anymore. Yet we're still there."

Crossmaglen Rangers outlasted another daunting, towering institution.

A few months ago the club received official notification they've waited decades for. The army barracks was being taken down.

The old barracks. It never broke them, it probably made them, but it was a test they should never have had to endure.

Margaret recalls the night her Jim, Ois�n's older brother, passed it on the way to a local disco. "He had seven and six shillings, you know, old money, with him.

The soldiers took it out of his pocket and spread it on the ground and said, 'You're going to have some night now.'" Another evening Jim and the lads were in the field when "there was an attack from our own side" and everyone scattered, ducking bullets. Just constant hassle, like going to training and being asked where you were going, or the team bus being held up by an hour on its way to an away game, or helicopters landing as a game was underway.

But they never took the playing surface itself. And they never broke the club's spirit. "The club would have had a very dignified fight with them, " says Margaret, who served as club secretary through those testing years. She takes great pride that club members never threw stones or never, as she puts it, "joined in" with what others called "the cause". Their cause was football and the right to play it in peace.

Now they can. Now you can see the football field from the approach roads to Crossmaglen. The other week families and houses, like the one Margaret grew up in, adjacent to the clubhouse, could reclaim their full gardens. "They have to be out of here by the first of April, " she says. "It's great to see them gone. Well, the police barracks will still be there. You have to have the bit of law and order too."

In Armagh football, Crossmaglen Rangers are the law and order. They've won the last 11 county titles, though it hasn't been that straightforward; "for a few years there, " says this year's manager, Donal Murtagh, "it seemed every week John McEntee was whipping over the last point from 50 yards". They've dominated the Ulster landscape, winning five provincial titles, and are now 60 minutes away from their fourth All Ireland title in 10 years. Only the other Rangers, Nemo, stand taller on the All Ireland club skyline. And like Nemo, the secret to Crossmaglen's success has been their capacity to innovate, reinvent and yet stay true to certain principles. Joe Kernan was Cross's Billy Morgan, the man who came up with a game the rest were not familiar with.

When he took over as club manager at the start of 1994, the club hadn't won a county title since 1986, but he was convinced the famine would end if Cross abided by a system of play he had devised.

Defensively, they'd employ a zonal system, in which the centre of his defence wouldn't move and that defence would work the ball up the field by hand, before the big diagonal ball would be unleashed. "We were beaten in '94 and then by Mullaghbawn in '95, " recalls Margaret, "and everyone was saying Joe had got his tactics wrong. But it paid off. Sure they're all handpassing now, aren't they?"

That's what John Morrison finds so amazing about Crossmaglen. Teams imitate how they play, everyone knows how they play, yet you can't stop how they play. "They're like Tyrone, " he says.

"One man gets injured, another comes in for him and they play and win the same way."

And yet they've changed. Ois�n McConville has been on all 11 county-winning teams and has seen how the current side differs even from the one that lost an All Ireland semi-final to Portlaoise two years ago. "We're not as physically imposing as we were. When we were winning All Irelands, we'd four or five men across the field, all 6'2, '6'3, 6'4.

After Portlaoise, we realised we had to change, to get more pace in our game. We rely on a lot more football now."

They have the kids with the legs and the football to play it. Full forward John Hanratty, midfielder David McKenna, and the two other Kernans, Tony and Paul, are all aged under 20. And there's the talented minors - Ray Carragher, Paul McKeown and Stephen Finnegan.

Six minutes into the second half of last month's All Ireland semi-final against St Brigid's, Murtagh made three substitutions.

If it was a perfect illustration of Murtagh's ruthlessness and Cross's new-found depth ("Back in '99 and '00, " says Margaret McConville, "you'd dread anyone would get injured"), it also underlined Murtagh's trust in youth.

McKeown and Finnegan were two of the players brought on, 18-year-old Tony Kernan, the other.

Murtagh has also been pivotal to this latest push. "He's got a nice, relaxed, yet very focused approach, " says Ois�n McConville. "He knows us all, knows what makes us tick." At the start of last year Murtagh looked as if he'd be returning to Donaghmoyne, who he had helped to the Division Two title in Monaghan, but when his own club came back saying they were still stuck for a manager, Murtagh relented.

Any other answer would have been alien to his nature. In the late '80s and for most of the '90s he was considered the best full-back in Armagh, yet he never played championship for them.

"Donal was a very private, very club-oriented man, " says John Morrison. "We're talking about another Francie [Bellew, who never played for Armagh before Joe Kernan became county manager], only worse."

Morrison knows. He was one of the county selectors who tried to persuade Murtagh to come on board. There were others, says Murtagh, who works as a greenkeeper. "One boy showed up with a golf bag, and no intention of playing golf." Murtagh had no intention of playing with Armagh. He trained for a few months, when Kernan was assistant to Paddy Moriarty, but all he wanted to do was get back with the club. "And I don't regret it, " he says. "I achieved everything I wanted to with Cross."

It took time. He was only a sub in '86, and for the next 10 years waited to win his first county on the field. Then he won 10 in 10 years, before a cruciate ligament forced him to watch the 2005 All Ireland semi-final from the sideline. It was a glorious period. They had only one month off between the start of 1995 ("Right after we lost to Mullaghbawn that year, we were straight back training for '96") and the end of 2000 when Castleblaney stopped them winning a third Ulster on the trot, but they wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

It's the same now. Murtagh can see that, and even from his remove, so can Kernan. "The first thing at the start of the year is to get out of the county. We might huff and puff along the way to it but once we get there, the eyes light up and you just know boys want to go further."

The eyes are always bright though.

Murtagh tells a story from last summer when one of his starters was invited to the stag of a friend from a neighbouring club. "The boys told him it was in New York, on St Patrick's weekend. Our boy told them, 'I'll go but not on Patrick's Day. I'll be in Croke Park.' Some people might see that as arrogance but we don't."

Murtagh will continue to plan and dream. "I had three goals when I took over. One was to equal or beat Ballina's record of 13 county titles on the trot.

Another was to overtake Castleblaney;

they've won 37 county titles; we've won 35. And the other is Nemo [seven All Irelands]."

That New York stag is on in a fortnight's time, but Crossmaglen aim to go on forever.