Brought the kids along to the big game on Saturday. WE left with a slightly giddy feeling. Sure it was just an O'Byrne Cup win over Westmeath, achieved at home as well but it signalled the last ersatz hostilities before the GAA season begins in earnest next week. This time of the year is like the magical spring training rituals which shape the rhythm of the baseball season in the US. It's a time to be out with a keen eye.

Dublin made heavy weather of things in Parnell Park on Saturday afternoon but there were reasons to be cheerful. This is the time of the year when we start to gauge our teams seriously. WE always count up the reasons to be cheerful first.

Just to see if we have 15 of them. Sure we make some allowance for heavy work in training and handicap certain teams in hurling and football for whom the league induces narcolepsy but all in all we should be getting some idea of who is going in what direction and at what speed.

Although it is only four years since Dublin last celebrated an All-Ireland win, we make no apologies for telling the rest of the country again that Dublin badly needs another All-Ireland. The GAA needs Dublin to have another one. The 1995 team had been skirmishing at the top level since 1989 and probably deserved to win big in two or three other years before they finally fell gasping over the finish line in 1995. So be warned we feel we have a moral right.

On Saturday there were but a few ragged remnants of that 1995 team left. Farrell, Gavin, Stynes, Galvin and Curran. Paul Curran played at centre back but it seems likely that he will resume on the wing when the big-time stuff starts. If the Dublin half-back line looks like being Curran, Ian Robertson and Paul Croft, then nobody will complain.

Indeed if Dublin could find a solid full back or inject five years of experience into some of the good young ones, they would have the makings of a decent team. Liam Walsh is back from his exclusive arrangement with the county hurlers and will press hard for a spot in the full-back line. If he could hack it as a number three, many headaches would be lifted.

Midfield and the forwards should settle themselves. Ciaran Whelan, Brian Stynes, Paul Bealin and Enda Sheehy represent solid options at midfield. At least one will probably be used to beef up the forward lines who are looking capable but diminutive. Lots of light fast players but no big mullocker for them to revolve around or no Ja Fallon or Michael Donnellan to cut 40 yards out of a defence whenever the need arises.

Wherever you are, you know the worries at this time of the year. In Dublin we survey the county hurlers, suddenly shorn of their two Kilkenny buttresses and shake our heads and rub our chins. WE had thought the Dublin hurlers might be reaching a peak this summer. Then they lost by 21 points in Parnell Park in the first round in Leinster last year and we wondered had they actually gone as high as they were going to go the year before.

Probably not. The county is bursting with young hurlers of genius but there are more good ones coming through than at any time in recent memory. The trick will be to rediscover the momentum and to keep them interested.

This time of year the ritual is always the same. You look at what's on the field in front of you, the way things are shaping at home, then start peeping over the county borders wondering about what's cooking elsewhere, keeping an ear cocked for rumours of rows and fallings-out and record training feats.

Kildare trained for one hundred nights on the run during Christmas week. Meath ran up four mountains and then carried them home.

In Dublin there is the all too familiar feeling that Meath will just have improved. Bah. For a team that won an All-Ireland as recently and as youthfully as Meath's 1996 effort it seems unfair. Young Nigel Crawford has brought them more options and their snappy new forwards are a year ahead of Dublin's in development.

Most of the squad have been around the block not just once in terms of an All-Ireland win but in the cauldron of those games against Kildare. You couldn't buy experience like that. Or we in Dublin would just have bought it.

It is conventional wisdom hereabouts that Kildare might be gone for a few years. All that huffing and puffing last year needed to have an All-Ireland at the end of it, we say, forgetting our own struggles before 1995. Kildare arrived in Croke Park last September whistling and left weeping. Can they pull it out again. Nah.

All those variables to play around with. Ger Loughnane staying on in Clare for the big crack at what people are calling the virtual three in a row. Will the Galway hurlers' endless gestation period finally come to an end. What about Waterford, have they the stuff in them to start all over again?

And JBM's boys? Men yet? Or will Offaly be able to thrive in circumstances that lack the motivational prick of adversity. And Wexford hobbled by big injuries last year. You'd have a quiet fancy for them to boil away the resentments of having had to watch an Offaly-Kilkenny All-Ireland final.

The beauty of it is the quickening of pace from next weekend onwards. Hurlers and footballers blooming and taking shape like spring gardens. The fly boys of October and November suddenly getting knocked over and trampled by the stampeding old hands.

Lots to look forward to. Will John Maughan have cloned a decent forward from the wedges of Ja Fallon's flesh left beneath his defenders' fingernails. Can Armagh play as well on sunny days as they have on dank winter ones. What impact will John O'Keeffe's quiet thoughtfulness have on Kerry's campaign?

This is the time of the year when it is all in the melting pot. Come summer, the Sundays start falling one after the other and the room for contemplation is limited. Before you can draw breath July is done with and most of the teams in the country lie slain.

All that football league stuff before Christmas was meaningless tomfoolery. The GAA season starts next Sunday, with teams getting nimbler and brains getting focussed and managers banging tables and saying 11 weeks boys, 10 weeks boys, nine weeks lads.

You can feel it. The GAA world getting up and stretching and shaking the sleep from its head. Some teams have been training since late summer last year but now with January expired the whole world seems real again and the pulse pumps a little bit faster and pub talk gets a deal more earnest.

A good full back and a big fast forward and I'm telling ye boys . . . .