Kerry v Tyrone: Tom Humphriesfinds Kerry's talisman eager for this year's challenges

February comes bearing different challenges to different counties. In Kerry, more than anywhere else, they look to maintain and sustain. February isn't a time of fanciful blueprints or talk-radio bragging. It's a question of shaking the winter out of the limbs and looking down the days without too much urgency. It's a time when Kerrymen plan to do what they did last year. Only better.

You find Kieran Donaghy in the Ulster Bank on Ashe Street in Tralee, a suitably sober precinct for the daytime occupation of a young man who has grown into Kerry's tradition of quiet excellence. All around in various places of business that Donaghy could break the windows of with a kick of a ball are men who have more All-Ireland medals than he has and who have known more celebrity and more enduring success than he.

And as a collective they arrived with just about the same G-force impact as Donaghy did two summers ago.

So, when February comes, maintaining and sustaining are as natural as winter's yielding of the stage to spring. Kerry went to Donegal on the opening weekend of the league and were more sprightly and competitive than men with nothing to prove have a right to be. They lost a game they had at least earned a right to draw when Eoin Brosnan experienced the rare misfortune of scoring an own goal in the dying seconds.

Donaghy discarded his shirt in a gesture of disgust that told plenty about Kerry's commitment on the night. They absorbed the implications of the larceny when they came home. They moved on. Business to do.

"We lost a game that we should at least have drawn and we were sick at the time. But look, it was a bad night. We were down to 14 men and we played into the wind in the second half and were two points up before the goal. It was bad to lose and it puts pressure on us this weekend, but there were lots of positive things," he says.

"We can be happy enough with ourselves. We did very well in the second half and deserved a point. After the game there was complete disgust; a few days after, we looked at the big picture. It eases the pain that we put in a good performance."

Listening to Donaghy earnestly muse on the situation Kerry found themselves in, one cannot but reflect that, for a young man, his wild years and his difficult second-album phase are already well behind him. This is a different man from the fecklessly talented young fella encountered in Rus Bradburd's Paddy on the Hardwood, the kid who was always telling Bradburd, then coach at Tralee Tigers, that he had been six weeks off the drink.

Given he had been footballer of the year in his first full season, you feared for Donaghy last year when he started the league in a state of high combustibility, drawing red cards twice before travelling to Letterkenny for last year's joust with Donegal and coming off again with a shoulder injury which would cost him the rest of the spring.

Donaghy came back for the championship, however, and though he didn't deliver a necklace of headlining goals or put Francie Bellew onto the seat of his pants, he delivered performances of greater maturity, subtlety and variety. He proved himself as a footballer and not as a one-trick pony, albeit a pony with a really good trick.

First thing he does when this is put to him, however, is to shuffle through the file and find the bad day. He ranks his performance against Monaghan, on a day when Kerry generally struggled and Monaghan were wonderful, to have been his most disappointing. He doesn't wrap it all up in false modesty, though.

"Monaghan was my only blip, but it wasn't good. I didn't play well. I was happier with the Dublin game though. Darragh [Ó Sé]went off that day."

Seeing the great midfielder hobbling off the battleground meant only one thing for Donaghy: he would imminently be summoned to the centre of Croke Park.

"I remember seeing Darragh going off to the line and thinking, 'No! Not against Dublin! Not in Croke Park! Not in an All-Ireland semi-final! No!' That came over me for two or three minutes. He went in under the dug-out. I decided it was a good thing, that he might come back on quick.

"Sure enough they called me to go down the middle of the field, and I did an okay job out there with Séamus Scanlon and Tommy Griffin. So I was pleased with that. It took a good while for Darragh to come back though! Declan (O'Sullivan) was awesome on the day, and obviously the Gooch, but it was good for us to survive after losing a player like that."

He had a right to be pleased. His performance wasn't just one of maturity; it reflected a capacity for leadership that spoke well of the nurturing Donaghy has received under various managements.

His distribution was thoughtful and excellent, his running selfless, and it is hardly surprising now to reflect that it was into Donaghy's arms that Stephen Cluxton kicked the ball after his ill-judged solo run, and that Donaghy refused to let the blood go to his head and attempt to pump the ball back over Cluxton and instead initiated the move which led to Seán O'Sullivan's point that effectively ended the game.

It was a thoughtful moment which underlined a key difference between the sides and, particularly, the younger players on each side.

The All-Ireland final, of course, was scarcely the sort of thing that young men's dreams are made of, although it was crowned as a spectacle by a Kerryman lifting the silver.

"You dream of close games and needing a point or two in the last minute, games that go down to the wire. That's what you prepare for. To be fair, the last two years we have just been prepared exactly right and we hit the ground running.

"Management each year had us bouncing out of our skins. You would have to give the managers huge credit. Last two years we have been 100 per cent - but it doesn't make for great finals!"

His only experience of the sort of game he describes was in 2005 when he watched as a sub. That game informs much of what's attractive about tonight's fixture.

"Tyrone have had two hard years, but I don't think the rivalry between us has changed that much. 2005 was my first year in around the place. It's different when you are a sub. As a player it hurts a bit more. As a sub, you can't do anything on the day so I think you take the defeat better. But it hurt the lads. I could feel it myself.

"I remember a fifth sub went on for us and I knew I wasn't going in and I just turned into a punter right there in the stand. If the Gooch had got a late goal I would have celebrated harder than any fan.

"So it's Tyrone, and anyway we need to win after losing the last game. Starting the first two games with zero points wouldn't be great."

He has coffee some mornings with Mikey Sheehy. As an Austin Stacks player he is constantly aware of his place on history's totem pole. Two All-Irelands isn't sufficient decoration for any Kerryman interested in greatness.

"We are brought up knowing that. Two All-Ireland medals! There are fellas around the road here with five. I was with Jimmy Deenihan last week, he has five.

"I'm good friends with Mikey and with John O'Keeffe. Johnno used to teach me in school and Mikey would be a selector with the club. Or Ger Power and Ger Keeffe. And they all have six, seven or eight medals. If you got a big head down here after winning two of them you'd be laughed at. And rightly so.

"Last year's All-Ireland was very enjoyable and, as a year, once championship kicked off, I felt I was motoring okay. But it's over. The appetite is 100 per cent already this year. I had a very bad league last year, getting sent off twice and then breaking the shoulder. When the first round of the championship came I hadn't played in three or four months."

Summer ended satisfactorily, of course, but one suspects this Kerry squad and Donaghy are about bigger pictures. "There were two sides to winning last September. Elation straight after and on the day after, but we came down to earth much quicker and set about the task quicker for this year. We started back with four or five sessions before we went on holidays in November, and then we started back into it seriously two days after we got home. We have a good month of work behind us now.

"The whole panel went to America and Hawaii, wives and girlfriends and everything. It was very enjoyable. No major drinking sessions, lots of things to do. We did as much as we could do. We went to Pearl Harbour and Alcatraz. We went jet-skiing and power-boating and paragliding and all the things you wouldn't get to do again."

Kerry in Hawaii? Scene of the legendary booze cruises embarked upon by the heroes of the 1970s? A team who viewed the league as a series of challenge games to be endured before the season started in earnest at midsummer?

"Yeah, the Seventies lads stopped in a place called The Outrigger. They still talk about it, I think. We have nothing on a par with those boys though."

To the previous sentence he might add the word - yet. Nothing on a par with those boys yet. Kerry are looking dynastic again, though. Clear favourites for this year and talent seeping through everywhere.

"Continued success is what you would always be hoping for. That's why you bring young players into the panel. You have good training matches, young fellas coming up playing wing forward and they have to go out and mark Tomás Ó Sé, or a young corner forward comes in and ends up on Marc Ó Sé, the footballer of the year.

"David Moran in Donegal was man of the match for me in his first National League game on a cold Saturday night in Ballybofey. That's massive. I am a firm believer in one game at a time. The next game is against Tyrone, but all the bits and pieces add up if you want continued success."

This spring they toil without the Gooch, and Darragh Ó Sé has just returned to the panel. Others, including Paul Galvin, are sidelined with injuries, but Kerry seem as formidable as ever, mysteriously replenished and hungry at the same time.

Donaghy, tamed and focused, will be at the cutting edge again, at one with the philosophy of his peers and his elders. "Success? Yerra, I do my same bits and pieces as I always did. If anything, it has made me more dedicated. Once you taste a piece of success you want to keep a hold of it as much as you can. Just looking to keep myself going as strong and as hard again for as long as I can."

The Kingdom and its princes.

Same as it ever was.

Same as they ever were.