IF you didn't know better, you'd think things just fall into place for Luke Dempsey. From Leinsters to All Irelands and back again with Westmeath's youth, to a couple of National League titles, to a championship win with Carlow, to Longford's incredible exploits last year. At one stage in Mullingar's Park Hotel on Thursday, the coffee he wanted arrived at his table before he even had a chance to order.

His reaction? A casual thanks.

But as for the football? It's met with the same torrent of facts and figures and excitement you can only imagine existed all those years ago.

The year is 1994. He briefly thought himself a little naive to have expectations with Westmeath's minors. Ahead of a challenge match, 40 promised to show up in the town square. When only 13 stood there with their bags on game day he was forced to call Tommy Cleary. The Downs player refused to budge but said he'd go if they picked him up at the home place. The following September Cleary kicked 1-5 in an All Ireland final won by Dempsey's side. That night when they arrived back to Mullingar they found the park tarred with people. The swimming pool roof was ready to drop into the water below and by the time he was thrust onto a bandstand and told to address those waiting, he felt Papal. He should know too, after all his mother had dragged him to a similar event in the Phoenix Park 15 years earlier.

In 1999 it all took off again, this time with the under-21s.

He's probably slightly wrong in his estimation that 14,000 of his followers travelled to the Gaelic Grounds while about 400 made the much shorter trek from Kerry, but he can be forgiven. Turning the world on its head that day was only the beginning. The side toured back home for about four months and he's still not sure if the places they went ever existed. Ballynacargy, Clonmellon, Fore, Rathowen.

Maybe they are there, but they'll never be the same.

Problem was things never fell into place. His success was hard work and the 30 pieces of silver that ended it all after his term with the seniors was proof. There are times his voice lowers as he scrawbs his nails across those dark days. Not the disastrous league of 2002 that saw them thrashed for months on end and ultimately relegated. Not the championship that briefly followed. Not even Dessie Dolan's missed free from 14 yards that would have seen them beat Meath for the first time in their history. Instead the closing months of 2003 and the knives from behind.

"I suppose the day Dessie missed the free sounded the death knell for me. I've seen too many horror stories and shocks to take anything for granted but looking back, there is a psychological thing with Meath when it comes to Westmeath. I never allowed myself to believe that then, but now I think it's fact. Either that or they've a voodoo doll or something. But the dressing room after that was in sheer f**king shock. Everyone found it was brutal hard to pick themselves up and we fell to Monaghan in the qualifiers not long after and it was too much. But the Meath game signalled an end for me.

It didn't take long either. You could get the sense of the rumours going around. They print what's said at the county board meeting and someone said they should get a new manager because the only county I'd ever beaten in the Leinster championship was Carlow. That was a fair insult because while it was true, it was always Meath we lost to."

The players held a meeting at the end of that '03 campaign and David Mitchell rang Dempsey to inform him of their wants and needs. Their main desire was for Dessie Dolan snr to be brought on board and the manager had no problems satisfying their wishes because everyone could see 2004 was the year the tremors would become a quake. "Me and Dessie and Johnny Mills, we would have been a great team. But behind the scenes there was movement among different clubs regarding a change of management. I was on holidays in Portugal and I got a call from a journalist saying that the county board had held a meeting to discuss managers for the new year and they wanted to interview me for the job.

It gets into your head, or at least it got into mine. I was walking around, lying on a beach thinking these f**kers want to interview me. After hearing all this through the papers, one club suggested that Martin McCabe, who was training Garrycastle and who is a really lovely fella, should be given the job. Not interviewed for it, given it.

"I know him well and I rang him and he said he had two young kids, he had no interest so it went as bizarre as that. I thought I had two choices. Let myself be interviewed for a job I was after doing for three years and sell myself to county board fellas I've been sitting beside on buses for a decade.

Or walk. I thought no way to the first and some people have said I was stupid . . . look what I could have won. But it doesn't happen that way. I would never have done that. But it was a huge void all the same.

A massive chunk of my life was pulled away as something big was about to happen. Paidi [O'Se] knew that and I thought, 'Christ!'" It wasn't being in charge of Carlow in '04 that kept him away from Westmeath's run to a Leinster final. He was too angry and the mixed emotions spat out by their success was doing Dempsey little good. But living in Mullingar, teaching in Rochfordbridge, there was no escaping the hype that surrounded the Leinster final against Laois. "I went in the end. I even had the bottle to go to the celebrations upstairs in the Ard Comhairle. I met all the players there that I had been with and it was very strained, for me anyway. Paidi wasn't there, but some of the county board guys were. And you must understand there was an overall county board and I got on fine with them. It was the football board though. The football board guys never rang after that to acknowledge what I might have done to get that side to be Leinster champions. They were ruthless, that's the word I'd use. I learned a lesson in hindsight.

They didn't give a shit. I went down to the celebrations that night, it was down in the Greville Arms and I couldn't even get in to see the players, I was out with the crowd. People were coming up drunk and saying, 'Eh Luke. it was your team, it was your doing'. I just wanted to get in and see the team and in my head it was like the previous nine years never happened. Completely wiped and forgotten."

It's about now he brings up Martin Skelly, the Longford chairman, the best he ever worked with. It pushes the past ever closer to a precipice.

After they beat Derry last year Skelly was only too happy to fundraise and get the team a trip to Mexico. He went out of his way to help Dempsey at every turn, even when Longford football was Longford football as we used to know it.

"I think he was as delighted as we were with the progress.

And there was a lot of progress. When I came in, the atmosphere in the county was depressing from a football perspective. I went from a county where everyone expected me to win something else and one year was more exciting than the next.

Now I found myself driving home from Longford and I used to say, 'Jesus Christ, what does it take here?' There was nearly a cloud over the car following me home after training sessions and these people don't want to know ya, don't give a shit who you are.

"I used to cross the border and feel relieved because this county [Westmeath] had some football interest. So I found the exact opposite to what I had been used to. But I found the exact opposite last year as well where people went out of their way to do something for you in Longford, to get the best out of a county that was going places.

And that was the players. A fantastic attitude. The under21s started it. The Dublin game continued it and despite Tommy Lyons saying Dublin had an easy run to a Leinster title everyone knows we should have beaten them. It went from there. But we have to build on that. Progress can be slow in a county of Longford's size but it must be steady."

It's perhaps the latest journey that has set him free from the shackles of what might have been. He refuses to acknowledge that today's game is any different from others he's faced into. He points to the fact he still manages a girl's team for Mullingar Shamrocks despite his falling out many years ago.

He points to his management of The Downs last summer despite the presence of a number of county players past and present. And he points to Pearse Park at 2.00 this afternoon.

"I have no feelings towards it. It is almost as if the Westmeath factor never existed.

It might sound strange but that's the way it is. I'll be able to go up to the players afterwards and say hard luck or well done and really mean it.

Not a lot of people can say that."