"Ach, you're McFadden; the boy that played Tyrone." You remember; Mickey Harte's team entered Clones one Sunday chest out as All Ireland and Ulster champions and left it wet and sullen and bowed. They scored only nine points that day. The cub Colm McFadden's left foot scored more than that on its own. It was all there. A goal, a 45, frees from all angles, and a couple of points from play.

As Keith Duggan put it in The Irish Times the following morning, a new name was on everyone's lips.

And then, it barely passed them. In 2005 he might have kicked 3-19 in the league and another 20 points in the championship, but Donegal again imploded that summer, leaving McFadden's profile in tatters. Even last year, when he was away in college in Liverpool, it was always Kevin Cassidy's and Brendan Devenney's exile we kept talking and hearing about, not McFadden's. Last Sunday though, when 73 players were on display on the stage that's Croke Park, McFadden played the lead part. Again, he chipped over a few frees, stroked over four points from play, while it was his heft and his pass that put Kevin McMenamin through for the game's decisive goal. Nearly three years on from Clones, and he was finally again the name on everyone's lips.

Ever since he was in his mid-teens, football men in the county were telling other football men about this special player, McFadden. Martin McHugh would have been one. In 1999, McHugh was over a Donegal under-16 squad that entered the Ted Webb Cup. Up to that year the competition had been exclusively for Connacht counties and the following year it reverted to that. "We hammered everyone, " recalls McHugh, "and then they threw us out. Because of McFadden. He was unmarkable. " Even then McFadden was playing minor for the county and he would continue to command attention throughout his underage career. In 2003, a month after himself and Micheal Meehan had tormented defences to land NUI Galway the Sigerson Cup, he threw his jersey at his under21 county coach, Sean McEniff (Brian's son), after being substituted during their Ulster championship clash with Monaghan.

McFadden had scored five of Donegal's six points. In the closing minutes of a tight game, McEniff brought him back on again but it was too late for the coach to salvage either a win or McFadden's respect.

McFadden is a placid, unassuming interviewee but mention of that under-21 game betrays a more assertive, assured streak.

"I can't understand why I was taken off that day at all.

I was just after kicking a point, actually, my third from play. Next thing, 13 went up and I thought, 'Jesus, must be the wrong number.' I looked over. 'No, ' he said. 'It's you.'

Took me off."

And your reaction now to your reaction then?

"Throwing the jersey?" he asks. "Don't regret it one bit, " he smiles before sipping some water. "I'd do it again too.

Probably the strangest decision I've ever witnessed anyway."

Other charges of defiant rebellion have been levelled against him but if you examine the evidence, most of those cases collapse. The month after his blazing display against Tyrone, Donegal football was again in disarray, after shipping a heavy defeat to Armagh in the Ulster final in Dublin and a dispiriting one to Fermanagh. Before the start of that qualifier, McFadden had stood alone, away from his teammates, for the national anthem. The previous week his clubmate Brian McLaughlin had been dropped from the panel and McFadden's stance was interpreted as a form of protest and a symbol of Donegal's disharmony. It was something altogether more innocent than that.

"That was a wet day up in Clones, wasn't it?" he says, nonchalantly. "[John] Gildea was playing then too, wasn't he? Aye, in the warm-up I'd got him to kick in a few balls to bounce in front of me which I could go for at pace, like. Next thing he kicked in one and it skirted off and went way into the corner. So I leg it down into the corner to get the ball, I get the ball and next thing everyone else is lining up in the middle of the field. I started to jog up and McEniff shouted at me to stop for the anthem. So I stood on my own." There was no row last year either. At the start of that season alright, Brian McIver left him off the 30-man panel for the league after his petulant performance against Tyrone in the McKenna Cup but that was more a symptom of the cause rather than the cause itself. McFadden had been in Liverpool, studying to be a teacher, and hadn't been putting in the necessary time to have the necessary confidence in his game. McIver would keep him on the extended panel, and even give him some game time in that year's league against Clare and Limerick, but soon after both manager and player agreed it wasn't working out.

"It was wild hard to train over there on your own, and then the travelling was tiring too. You were losing two days at the weekend, going back and forth, and then when you'd be back in Liverpool you were flat out doing the course. My body wasn't in the best of shape so Brian said, 'Look, just concentrate on getting your course and we'll have at look at you again in the summer.'

"I knew myself it would be June before I'd be back and that the boys could be in an Ulster final and it would be hard to break into the team.

So I kind of knew I was going to be out for the year and I was happy enough with that.

You can get into a rut, playing and training every year. Being away for the year helped me get my hunger for the game back."

He mentions last year's Ulster final by way of example. Himself and his girlfriend made a weekend of it in Dublin, just like the entire county seemed to. The buzz and anticipation in Dublin that night was something he hadn't experienced before, and the sense that the players were playing for something much bigger than themselves, something he mightn't have fully appreciated either.

"It was good craic that night but it's probably better to be involved, " he says. "There'll be plenty of time for the craic again in a few years' time."

It took him some time last summer to find his form with the club, but by the county quarter-final he had, as himself and Christy Toye helped St Michael's bundle defending champions Glenties out of the championship. After Michael's suffered a wrenching lastminute defeat in the semi-finals, the anguish was somewhat eased by a call from McIver, wanting him back with the county.

There's been the odd hiccup since. A posterior ligament injury kept him out of the McKenna Cup, and when he came on at half-time in the first league game against Cork, he "got some shock. . . I was nowhere near the pace of it at all". The following week against Mayo though he felt at ease back in the big time. Even when he picked up a niggling hamstring injury against Kerry which kept him out for a few weeks, it gave him a chance to take a few days' break in Barcelona while St Eunan's, where he now teaches Maths, were on holidays.

Last Sunday might have been only his second full game this season, but he's racked up 1-19 in this league. There's more to his game than scoring too.

"I think I'm better at bringing other players into the game. I got a right buzz setting up that goal for [Kevin] Whopper [McMenamin] last week, like, while a few years ago I might have been more shoot on sight. Compared to the Tyrone game [in 2004], I would prefer the Kildare match a lot more, definitely, because I played a more complete game."

He knows he could do more with his right foot. He admits he's laid-back, being the first to say that his brother Antoin, who played for St Eunan's in yesterday's All Ireland vocational schools final, "has a better attitude", that it's only this year he's kept more of an eye on his diet and "before a game might cut out on an old fry". But after this little chat, he's off to the gym, and then down to the field to practise some frees. He has a sense of purpose because he can see Donegal do too.

The future is back.