The place will never look better than it does today, buffed as it is for Nickey Brennan to cut its ribbon.

This is big stuff, genuinely.

Colin Regan has been playing for Leitrim so long now that the first manager to call him up to a county panel was John O'Mahony. In all his years playing in Carrick, the showers have been the one constant. Players, managers, supporters . . . these people come and these people go.

But the showers have always been there, as reliably cold and dribbly as ever. "Sure, they used to have to put on the gas to warm the water, " he laughs. "They were put in in 1964 or something. To get them going, the boys had to be there with the matches trying to light it. By the time the water came out, there was only ever a dribble of it. You'd be nearly as well spitting on your hand."

That all this state-of-theartery has arrived now that he's 31 and closer to the finishing line than the starting blocks might bug him if he were that way inclined. But he isn't and anyway it's the kind of thing he's had to get used to along the way.

Consider the following for a list of nearlys-but-notquites. In 1994, when Leitrim won only their second Connacht title ever, Regan was a minor who was 18 months away from being called up to the senior panel. There has been no third title. In 2000, when Leitrim beat Roscommon to make it to only their 11th Connacht final ever, he found himself suspended after The Sunday Game captured him clouting Francie Grehan off the ball. There has been no 12th final.

Last August, when after 10 years of cold showers and colder shoulders, he finally made it to Croke Park for the final of the Tommy Murphy Cup, he had a calf injury that stopped him training for the two-and-a-half weeks beforehand. Normally, that would have been that. The orders in Dessie Dolan's court are usually straightforward . . . you don't train the week of the match, you don't play. But Regan's eyes lodged an appeal on his calf 's behalf and in them were the pleadings of the decade's work he'd put in to get to play in Croke Park.

There were maybe two players in the Leitrim squad that Dolan would have relented for. Christy Carroll, who was playing his last game after 15 years of service was one.

Regan was the other.

"It turned into a nightmare.

I took two injections into the calf five minutes before going out and said we'd see how it went but I was gone after about 10 minutes or so and I was taken off. For the good of the team, I probably shouldn't have done it and maybe I was being a bit selfish but I had to give it a go." In the end, he could find a small, perverse piece of solace in the fact that Louth handed them their asses that day. They were slicker, cuter and had played in Croker before while Leitrim were wide-eyed in the beginning and legless by the end. A wing-forward's healthy calf muscle wasn't going to change all that one way or the other.

There are bigger things in life too. He lost a brother in a car accident in 2002, the next one up from him in a family of 12. Gordon Regan was actually working in the States at the time and had been home on a two-week visit when the car he was driving veered across the road and into oncoming traffic outside Dunshaughlin, Co Meath. They never found out exactly what happened but their best guess is that he fell asleep at the wheel.

"It was a crushing thing.

Every time I hear on the radio that someone's died in a car crash, I realise now more than I did before that it's not just a statistic, that there's a huge group of people whose lives have just been changed forever. Like, my mum and dad had their children all reared at that stage and thought that all they'd ever have to worry about was grandchildren. It was devastating for them."

The homeplace is in Kinlough, a rugged little collection of townlands tight against the Leitrim-Donegal border.

When it came to burying him, the six remaining Regan brothers took it upon themselves to dig the grave . . . the six of them, a few shovels and a case of beer on a grand spring evening with only their own voices to be heard for miles around. "We have a big party every year on his birthday. Gordon was mad into music and played in a few bands and Dad has an old farm that he bought down on the Leitrim-Sligo border around 15 years ago. A couple of months after he died, we wanted to do something to kind of bring everyone together who'd been so great to us around his funeral. So we invited all his friends and their families and all our friends and family and went for it.

All his mates who were in bands came along and we put up a stage and it was a lovely weekend. There must have been six or seven bands who played at it.

"So every year now, as a kind of ritual, myself and the brothers will head down to the farm the week before his birthday in July and start putting up the stage again.

My sisters come down too and get the place ready for people coming and it's nice for us all to do it together. It's a kind of quiet time for us too before all the people come for the weekend.

Loads of people come and camp and we light a big bonfire and sit up singing songs and having the craic all night. In the morning then, there's a couple of hundred of us waking up under Ben Bulben with hangovers.

Ah, it's lovely now. It's a great way to remember him."

There wasn't a massive amount of football played in the Regan house growing up but what there was was played by Gordon, Colin and an older brother, Barbour.

When Leitrim went to Ruislip last month to get past London, Regan spent a fair proportion of that night hearing from old heads about what a hardy man Barbour had been during his time playing for Tir Chonaill Gaels. He didn't mind. At least it meant they weren't talking about the game, which Leitrim had just about gotten through and no more.

"The thing with going up against London, " he says, "is that us playing London isn't the same as Galway or Mayo playing them. New York as well. They had us in their sights from the start of the season because they think that they have a shot at beating Leitrim. I know a couple of the lads that are involved over there and they have put in so much work since the start of the year and it was mostly because they had Leitrim in the first round in Connacht and the management had something to dangle in front of the players. So for us to get out of Ruislip with any sort of win was a good day."

Just before Christmas, he left his job as a reporter in the Donegal News to become editor of a start-up newspaper based in Carrick called the Leitrim Post. It's a change in life and lifestyle that has consumed him completely.

His deadline day is on a Monday so all through the Spring he found himself racing out of the dressing room after a league match and heading straight to the office. He often finds himself clocking up 55hour weeks, all before he's laced a boot. Something might have to give sometime soon.

"I know myself I'm not as fit this year as I was other years and that's down to the job, pure and simple. You could have counted on one hand the amount of training sessions I'd have missed down through the years but this year I've had to miss a few purely because of work. Whether to give it up is something I ask myself at the end of every season. What I'm after the whole time is the Connacht medal and I don't have it so that's the biggest motivation for me. It's what keeps me going."

That and the new showers, naturally.