Back to the future.It was fitting that the final act of this game should also have been the most sublime. Fitting too that it should have been executed by Maurice Fitzgerald. His genius illuminated this match as it has illuminated this and many other seasons. He applied the last punctuation mark. Standing on the touchline under the Cusack Stand some 55 yards away from the goal, he swung his right leg and posted the ball between the Mayo sticks. An exclamation mark at the end of his poem.

Referee Brian White correctly divined that there was no reason in playing any further. The maestro had brought the performance to a surprising crescendo. Kerry were All-Ireland champions again, taking home the silver in the lap of a young team which can only get better.

In a game which was filled with many things which were dreary and dull, a match flawed by errors and hamstrung by tension, it was Maurice Fitzgerald who had made the space to provide the moments of aesthetic beauty.

"It's a win for the whole team," he said afterwards, but the questions about personal fulfilment wouldn't go away. Fitzgerald is a throwback to a different era when skill counted for as much as endless endurance training. The hours and hours of solitary training paid their dividend for Fitzgerald yesterday.

There was much talk of the past in Croke Park. Little wonder with the winning manager owning a sackful of All-Irelands and with the Polo Grounds teams being exhibited to the crowd and with Kerry bridging such a long gap to their own history. Yet this team of theirs won a thoroughly modern All-Ireland. In doing so they laid to rest a million green and gold ghosts who have cackled at them from the mass grave of dead old teams.

In Kerry, back in the days when the team used to annually travel home in triumph on the train, there developed a tradition of detonating the fog warning horns all along the line from Rathmore to Killarney as the team passed through. One horn would sound for every All-Ireland the county won.

Tonight they could be kicking up a din, with 31 detonations. They are flying home however. It has been so long since a Kerry team returned home in September that tradition has become disconnected. The team will fly into Kerry airport and hit home territory in daylight. Another symbol that Kerry football is breaking its links with the past and building a team to last it into the new millennium.

In Croke Park yesterday the new era began. History echoed around the place of course . . .

"I saw him play many times," said midfielder Dara O Se of his uncle Paidi, "saw him winning many All-Irelands."

"I'd like to give a word of thanks to Mick O'Connell," said Maurice Fitzgerald, "he gave me so much advice and had so many chats on winter days. It stood to me today."

. . . but beyond the bloodlines history also took a beating.

None of this Kerry team had won an All-Ireland on the field of play before. They are a part of a great tradition, yet having been built from the ground up, they are sundered from it and owe it nothing.

"I am just happy for Kerry; for all the people at home in Kerry," said Paidi O Se, "that we are back with an All-Ireland. It has been a long time coming and we have been a long time laying to rest certain ghosts. Now that we have this one won, we can get on with things. There was a lot of people doubted we would ever do it."

As for Mayo? There was no controversy or bruises but in many ways this year's defeat mirrored last summer's. They played badly and still only lost by three points. They travel home again, knowing that inside them they have the capability of winning an All-Ireland. Winning it before the sheer intensity burns them out, will be their problem.

A penalty midway through the second half had given them a momentum which they never looked like creating for themselves.

For the duration of one short frenetic burst they looked like the team we imagined them to be, rattling in 1-2 in two minutes. Kerry began fluffing their own lines, missing three wides and it looked like the touchpaper for a great game had been lit.

Instead the match fizzled out. The Kerry defence played spoilsport. Maurice Fitzgerald played the violin. Liam Hassett lifted the cup.

Many old faces came to the Kerry dressing-room to offer tribute. Men, who in their pomp, strode the Kingdom with medals clanking in their pockets.

Yesterday's men relieved to be shut of the burden.