GAELIC GAMES:Fourteen years since they last claimed the Sam Maguire, Dublin fans now stare a barren decade in the face

GAA DIRECTOR general Páraic Duffy expressed concern at the start of the year that the association’s 125 anniversary celebrations might be a distraction from the very real challenges facing it. Anniversaries are just bookmarks in an ongoing history rather than intrinsically significant.

Sometimes, though, it’s hard to resist the neat context provided by dates and anniversaries. They’re often a blessing for the media, creating a lens through which the present can be glimpsed in the past.

In match programmes there are the perennial sections, ‘Ag Féachaint Siar’, in which the story of seasons past is encapsulated at 25-year intervals. Young people read them as history; older spectators scan the pages wistfully, checking them against memory and wondering where a quarter of a century went.

Occasionally, the past is prophetic. Back in 1975, Dublin met Kerry in an All-Ireland final for the first time in 20 years. That 1955 match is acknowledged as one of the epochal finals, a collision between sharp, slick and – in one of the era’s great commendations – ‘scientific’ football and the traditional virtues of Kerry’s catch-and-kick style.

It was also the precursor of Dublin-Kerry as a national occasion, the counties’ first All-Ireland in the age of mass-attendances. The crowd of 87,102 was a record for the time and has been surpassed only three times since. Not least it was urban versus rural on a big stage.

Dublin lost and the victory is still one of the most prized in the extensive portfolio of Kerry All-Irelands.

Twenty years on, Dublin’s top scientist Kevin Heffernan was back as manager and, eerily, his modern emphasis on physical fitness and athleticism recalled in some ways the accusations of the ‘new-fangled’ that must have echoed hauntingly down the decades when Mick O’Dwyer’s Kerry took on the white heat of technology not with a bucket of water as in 1955, but rather by fighting fire with fire and running ragged Dublin’s apostles of the new age.

This is the last year of the century’s opening decade. The 2000s are likely to become the first since the 1930s – and only the third overall – to return a blank on Dublin’s All-Ireland roll of honour and one of those was the GAA’s first decade of the 1880s during which only two championships were played.

These end-years have been significant in the past few decades. Thirty years ago saw the eclipse of Heffernan’s Dublin. Having won three All-Irelands in four years and beaten Kerry twice along the way, the counties’ graphs crossed and the developing maturity of O’Dwyer’s team was too uncontainable a force for the ageing city team.

When chasing the three-in-a-row a year previously, in 1978, Dublin had come up spectacularly short. There was consolation in the controversy of Mikey Sheehy’s free-kick and the acknowledged complacency, but the team was running on empty.

In 1979, Dublin completed the remarkable record of six successive Leinster football titles and six seasons that ran until September, emulating the great Wexford four-in-a-row team from 1915-18.

There was an epic feel to the season, reflected in resurrection during the Leinster final and Bernard Brogan’s late winning goal – despite the sending-off of Jimmy Keaveney for elbowing Ollie Minnock in what was an unpleasant match.

Another tooth-and-claw battle saw Roscommon beaten in the All-Ireland semi-final. But that was it.

Heffernan’s alchemy wasn’t entirely exhausted. Three of the team that turned over Offaly, including the late Mick Holden at full back, had never played competitively for the county seniors.

But any notions of rebuilding collapsed when the foundation stone of any such project, Brian Mullins, was nearly killed in a car accident in June, 1980.

Only 25, he somehow returned in time and was critical to the 1983 All-Ireland success, but the physical fluency that had helped him to dominate championship centrefields couldn’t be put back together again.

Twenty years ago a significant barrier fell. Having struggled free of Meath’s grip on Leinster in the Leinster final, Dublin’s antennae (or at least that of their supporters) twitched in anticipation at the fact that Kerry were enduring a bleak phase in Munster. It had been the county’s experience that if Kerry weren’t around, they had a great chance of winning the All-Ireland.

It’s one of the classic lines of the Heffernan era that a well-prepared Dublin side should never lose a football match to Cork. It tends to be taken out of context. The manager was trying to gee-up his team to play the then All-Ireland champions rather than be dismissive of their challenge.

In seven meetings during the history of championship football up until then, no type of Dublin team – well prepared or not – had ever lost to Cork.

But, in 1989, Cork were tempered in the fire of three All-Ireland finals, including the previous year’s replay, against Meath, but had yet to win the title.

Manager Billy Morgan’s diamond-edged desire to subjugate Kerry was being fulfilled and now he was desperate for an All-Ireland.

In the NFL final a few months before the All-Ireland semi-final of 20 years ago, Cork had beaten Dublin rather comprehensively and although dethroning champions Meath and wrecking their prospects of three-in-a-row had given Gerry McCaul’s side great momentum, they hadn’t the experience of operating at the same level as their opponents.

The semi-final may have featured a collectors’ item of a jittery performance from John O’Leary in goal, two penalties and a sending-off, but Cork won and added the All-Ireland after defeating a Mayo team, featuring in a final for the first time in 38 years, managed by John O’Mahony (along with Mick O’Dwyer one of the two 1989 managers still on the go).

Dublin eventually recovered, (although two years later the calamitous failure to shut out Meath in the fourth instalment of the 1991 saga further eroded the self-belief that only Kerry really had any business beating them) and won the 1995 All-Ireland.

Ten years ago, another Leinster defeat by Meath, as Seán Boylan’s team progressed to the All-Ireland, wasn’t particularly significant as Dublin were outsiders, but it was the last time the county reached the NFL play-offs, losing the final to Cork.

It was also Leinster’s last All-Ireland and preceded a decade in which the province has become the back-marker in football.

This championship is likely to mark another year down as the province heads in the direction of emulating its longest barren spell in football, the 1928-42 hiatus.

If 2009 is to fit snugly into the pattern of watershed years, Sunday’s contest between Dublin and Meath will need to be very significant.