Tyrone and Monaghan were to play a McKenna Cup semifinal at 7.30 in Breffni Park in Cavan but there'd been some sort of mix-up or cock-up somewhere along the line and the upshot was that Harte's side only had their white jerseys to play in. Usually when the sides meet they both change into all blue and all red so as to avoid clashing but this time Harte was wondering if McEnaney would mind letting them off just this once.

"That's no problem at all, Mickey, " he said, "but when we meet in the Ulster final, my lads will be wearing white." If Harte thought it was a wisecrack, he didn't let on. He said that was fine by him and went about his business.

Monaghan got a proper hiding that night in Cavan, an Eoin Lennon sending off early in the second half the low point in a 2-16 to 0-8 nightmare of an evening. But early spring is the time for this kind of thing, a chance to squirrel away a little trove of experiences and edges for use later in the year. And when the Ulster final did come around and Tyrone and Monaghan were both down to play in their changed strips as usual, McEnaney dipped into the trove and pulled out his little agreement with Harte. This was Ulster final day, this was in front of their own crowd in their own house for the first time since 1988. They would be proud men of Monaghan.

They would wear their Monaghan jerseys.

"We've played in blue jerseys four or five times and, look, we've got beat in them each time, " he says now. "We'd played in the white jerseys all year and played well in them and we just decided that this would help the psychology of the players. There was little made of it at the time or in the days after it but to me, if we'd won the game and it had been worth a half a millimetre to us, then it was a job well done."

(Half a millimetre? God be with the days it was only inches these teams fought forf) Anyway, the Ulster council weren't quite as worried about his millimetres as he was and let the Monaghan county board know about it.

He thinks there was probably a fine but hasn't a notion how much it was for or even if it was paid. He presumes somebody in the county board looked after it. Certainly nobody took him by the ear and scolded him.

He sits back now in his office on the third floor of his pub in Carrickmacross and laughs about it, a bit at the absurdity of the idea that the colour of the player's shirt could mean anything at all and a bit at the idea that folk thought he was pulling some sort of cute hoor stroke by doing it. Five days away from the biggest match of his life and he almost seems to be enjoying himself. Now that would be a stroke if he could manage to pull it off.

"You can't enjoy all this, " he says. "That's the reality of it. I love the few hours after a win. Love them. To be in our dressing room after winning a game, to be in the centre of the pitch warming down is all you can ask for. That hour is just like heaven to me. I love the night of a win, the few hours when you get back home and you meet the family and talk about the game.

"But the reality is, when you get up on Monday morning, the next challenge is a bigger one. The workload has gone up a notch, the next bit of organisation becomes the thing that consumes your mind. I put a lot of work into planning and would like to think I leave very little to chance. And you're under pressure all the time. It's next game, next game, next game . . . all the way. The time that you enjoy as a manager is those few hours. The rest of it, you can't."

By 10 o'clock on the night of that Ulster final he was in his sitting room with a pen in his hand, a notepad on his knee and the video of Tyrone v Donegal on the television in front of him. There were 13 days until the Donegal qualifier but he wanted to have it so that when they came to sit down for their team meeting on the Tuesday night, he'd be able to go around individually and give each player a broad idea of where he'd be playing and who he'd likely be on.

This, he says, would be the least his players would have expected to be furnished with, even with just over 48 hours gone since the draw had been made.

And would the year have been a failure if Donegal hadn't been put away?

"No, I wouldn't have said that. I would have said it was a huge disappointment but a failure, no. Because to me, the team had matured and that was the big thing.

We feel that we are knocking very hard on the door now.

Getting promoted was a real achievement and we can go into next year now knowing that for the whole of the spring, we're going to be playing the likes of Kerry and Dublin and Cork and Meath and whoever else. That was an achievement in itself. We wanted to win the Ulster championship . . . not get to the final, now, but win it . . . and there's no getting away from that. And we didn't and there's no getting away from that either.

"But the week that came after it told me everything I needed to know about these boys. We had a team meeting on the Tuesday night and then we trained on the Friday.

And you could tell 15 minutes into the session on Friday that these lads wanted more.

They just wanted more. I'm telling you, 15 minutes into the Friday night, I had no doubt that we'd beat Donegal. No doubt at all."

He talks about his players with a father's enthusiasm.

The few drinks they had the night of the Ulster final brought to an end a threemonth bout of abstinence that had been their idea and not his. Personally, he would have had no major problem with them taking a sup here and there if that's what they'd wanted to do but they hadn't and he marvels at how driven they are for boys in their 20s.

He knows that people up and down the country give them no chance today and that they mostly expect Monaghan to come to Croke Park and freeze like Sligo did last Saturday. That's no skin off his nose.

Because if he's had to get used to anything, it's being underestimated. When he heard that bookies were making Donegal odds-on favourites for their qualifier and his own team 15-8 outsiders, he was genuinely mystified. Had nobody watched his team play, he wondered.

But he got over it and used it to give his players a bit of a laugh at training. Three years into his time with them, he knows just how much to sugar their tea to let them enjoy it.

"I think I've got more confident in my own ability now [than when he took over]. By experience, you find more and more ways of getting it right.

Experience gives you the confidence needed to make the big calls. I'm not that sure that three years ago I would have had, for want of a better word, the balls to make some the calls we've made this year.

I probably lacked that a bit in my first year of management.

But today, nothing like that annoys me. I don't care what people think.

"Three years ago, I mightn't have had the balls to send Vinny Corey in full-forward.

Actually, it probably would have been unthinkable for me back then to do something like that. But now I trust my gut feeling a lot more. Some days the gut's wrong and that happens. But thankfully, a lot of the big ones have gone our way this year."

He'll talk Kerry up all day long but can't really hide the fact that he's delighted to be playing them. There's a photo hanging on the wall of his office taken at a gala dinner he organised with his club Corduff back in February 2005.

He's in the centre beside television's Adrian Logan, Joe Kernan is behind him and at either end of it are Darragh O Se and William Kirby, two All Ireland winners from the previous September, far from home and doing him a favour long after the post-All Ireland function circuit would usually have stopped.

The quirky thing about it was that McEnaney had seen more action during that All Ireland final than O Se had, for while the Kerry midfielder was sitting in the stands injured that day, McEnaney was umpiring for his brother Pat down at the canal end.

Watch the video and when Colm Cooper collects that high ball in the 25th minute, turns Pat Kelly and slaloms his way past another two before the slick left-foot finish, that's Banty McEnaney at the top of the screen in the white coat. He was the white flag man that day so he didn't get to wave the Gooch's goal home but he had the best view in the house of it. A week later, he found out he'd got the Monaghan job and his days as an umpire were over.

But now he's back in Croke Park, his head full of schemes and strategies for keeping Colm Cooper and Darragh O Se under wraps. Funny how the world turns, isn't it?