So he says anyway. Even if it's partly an act . . . for a man who says he doesn't read the newspapers, he has a fairly decent handle on how they saw the first game going and how they'll likely see the replay . . . it's still hard to picture him crying himself to sleep at night. His way of dealing with the past fortnight has been to accept it all, casually dismiss it and move on, even though it got a little personal at one stage when one of The Sunday Game panel announced the night of the drawn match that he has "always had a nasty streak in him".

"Yeah, that was Kevin McStay, " he says. "I saw it alright. Ah, I wouldn't expect anything more from a bitter Mayoman like him anyway.

He was always a whinger. Not too many people I know would be listening to him anyway. I wouldn't be paying too much attention to him."

Which is kind of Geraghty For Beginners. Say what you like about him but he's not an idiot. He knows McStay is as straight a pundit as there is out there and that where he comes from likely has little to do with what he said. But he knows too that if a man has a cut at him with the whole country listening in, it would look pretty shabby if he didn't have a little pop back. No big deal. Accept, dismiss, move on.

Look, he knows the television pictures look bad. He protests a little and points out that the price of doing business on a big televised stage is that the light picks out every last corner of it and that worse goes on where there aren't as many cameras and not a word is said. But that's not the point and, to be fair to him, he doesn't try and make it the point.

David Henry got clipped twice with the ball gone. Geraghty says that both times it was an accident.

"What happened happened . . . I wasn't trying to do anybody or hurt anybody. It happens when you go for the ball and try and punch it away and God knows I've been on the receiving end enough times down the years and never held it against anyone. They were totally accidental and I'd never try and hit any player intentionally anyway. We shook hands after the game and that was it."

Everyone's had their say in the fortnight since. Maybe he's lucky that the GAA have a pretty stacked plate in front of them at the minute as far as disciplinary matters go and so they seemed more than happy to keep him off it.

Maybe a more streamlined system would have him sitting in the stand today. Whatever, it was no skin off his nose one way or the other. He didn't think he deserved a suspension; he wouldn't have been amazed if he'd be given one.

"Ah, I tend not to read the newspapers and just get on with life. I was never too worried about getting banned. If you look at the incidents in slow motion, then alright, yeah, they look bad. But a lot of things happen in matches and they happen at 100 milesan-hour and there's not much you can do about them. It's different if you're standing toe-to-toe with a fella boxing the head off him like we saw with the hurling. In my case, I didn't think it was going to be a suspension."

And to the Dublin folk who've called him every name under the sun over the past two weeks (and the rest), he wants to let you all in on a secret. He loves you all. Thinks you make the GAA what it is.

Swears we'd all be lost without you.

"I love playing against the Dubs.

I've always done quite well against them. The build-up and the hype is always great. I definitely think that a Dublin-Meath match is bigger than the All Ireland final. I've played in a few of each and to me a game against the Dubs in Croke Park is the big one. If every county had the following they had, we'd be in great shape. These are the big games I enjoy. I find it very hard to go through the back door, to get yourself up for games in small grounds down the country. You want to keep playing in Croke Park in front of big crowds. I'd be a bit of a traditionalist anyway so I don't really like the back door. To me, the only people doing well out of it are the GAA, making more and more money."

A summer tour around the land wouldn't float his boat, so.

It figures. He's seen plenty of road since November and the announcement that he'd be standing as a Fine Gael candidate in Meath West. What started as a conversation with Shane McEntee . . . later re-elected in Meath East . . . at a function last summer ended with him being eliminated after the fourth count last month. He polled 1,284 first preferences, over 8,000 short of the quota needed.

To outsiders, he was a feckless conceit on Fine Gael's part, a celebrity calling card whose job it was to get them more coverage.

Meath West is a threeseat constituency in a fairly settled Fianna Fail stronghold and standing as the third Fine Gael candidate was always likely to be a thankless task. To him, though, this was a real thing.

True, he'd been initially as surprised as anyone to have been asked but the more doors he knocked on and the more hours he put in, the more he enjoyed it. It didn't work out in the end but as a first shot at it . . . and with only six months' work under his belt . . . he wasn't disgraced.

"I have to say that all the indications we were getting said that we were doing well and I went into polling day itself thinking I had a chance alright. But I suppose people are funny . . . they tell you on the door that they're going to vote for you but then come the day, that's when their opinion means something. I think a lot of voters got scared and changed their minds at the last minute because a lot of the people I was talking to, whether they were voting for me or not, they were talking about voting for change. And sure, they didn't in the end.

They might live to rue the day yet."

He'll go again, he reckons.

Now that he's dipped his toe, he's definitely of a mind to look about immersing himself in it. Politics doesn't have many people his age to turn to, or if it does they're the poor unfortunates that were scooped up at an early age by the child catchers in Young Fine Gael or Ogra Fianna Fail. The voices might be younger but the viewpoints don't necessarily vary from what went before.

Geraghty's baggage has been through all manner of different stops along the way and he feels it contains plenty he can use.

"I will stay in it, yeah, definitely. The local elections are in a couple of years and I'll look to run in them. It's a matter now of building my profile in politics because people still wouldn't see me as anything other than a footballer. I came in as a wild card really and I'd be fairly sure that a lot of the votes I got were floating votes.

The core Fine Gael votes would have gone to Peter Higgins and Damien English.

Hopefully that'll change the next time. I'll be throwing my hat in the ring anyway."

For now, though, it's today and the Dubs again. He never missed a night's training during the campaign and because of that he knows exactly what Meath have and haven't got to throw at The Hill. He's heard theories on the drawn game and thinks a lot of them are bunk . . . that he brought them back into the game ("Stephen Bray and Joe Sheridan scored more than I did"), that Meath's chance is gone ("A lot of our players didn't play up to their normal standards"), that the wet weather suited them ("We have a lot better ball-players than Dublin do, I think personally").

These are just the things he thinks. You're free to agree or disagree with him. Just don't expect him to be too bothered by your choice.