At last we all got to attend a Kerry press event. It has been 11 years since the media descended on the Kingdom in search of sharp insights from players and management in the weeks before an All-Ireland final.

A quick reckoning says that 10 of the 14 national journalists present last Saturday in Fitzgerald Stadium would not have been present on the last occasion the Kerry county board had to organise such a proceeding.

They were different days then. No sponsors of either the team or the championship. Fewer media outlets (this was before the launch of the local radio network in 1989) and a less overwhelming volume of coverage were all aspects of the All-Ireland final of 1986.

Furthermore, the Kerry team was at the end of a legendary run under Mick O'Dwyer. Five of the players had been on the team which broke through 11 years previously and the rest of the side were pursuing a third successive title.

They were a practised bunch when it came to fielding media inquiries and the most emblematic joke of the period involved Ger Power or Mike Sheehy leaving the field and calling to a reporter in hot pursuit: "Ah, sure put me down for whatever I said last year."

This year there are no survivors of that panel still in active service although Paidi O Se is now the manager. Nonetheless, the media facility remains enthusiastically executed, even 11 years on. Finding themselves strangely unfamiliar with the demands of the occasion, the county board officers simply asked the sponsors' PR consultancy to advise them on how best to organise it.

As mentioned in these columns recently, co-operation with the media is something journalists can't always take for granted even at All-Ireland level.

Only last Wednesday, Mayo - who appear to have taken the view this year that publicity poses as great a danger to their aspirations as the inability to convert possession into scores - produced five first-team players and two panellists (one with a broken leg) on their press night.

It was, accordingly, a relief to note that the Kerry players were all present and correct at the weekend. Maybe it's because there is more of a connection between the county board and the team management but Killarney worked as a conventional media exercise should.

Of course, the county officials have a great deal more to do than organise media liaison. The question of tickets is a curse that alights on every county secretary fortunate enough to see one of the teams reach a senior All-Ireland.

According to Tony O'Keeffe, the world is a also a changed place on the ticket front since 11 years ago when the problem last arose in the county. In 1986, each club received 100 terrace tickets for distribution; this year that figure is down to 30.

Interest is high after the longest barren spell since the county started winning All-Irelands 94 years ago. Killarney and other towns are putting out the flags in greater numbers than most locals can remember from the old days.

Some old habits die hard, though, and the poor attendance of Kerry supporters at the semi-final indicated that 11 years of shooting blanks still haven't persuaded the county to take semi-finals seriously.

A remarkable sense of uncertainty pervades the county in relation to the final selection with rumour and counter-rumour suggesting that up to five places could be in jeopardy. Whereas this will certainly be confounded, there remains an edge to pre-match speculation.

The GAA is such an institution in the county and Kerry such a formidable presence in the association that the long gap without an All-Ireland seems incongruous. So much has happened since 1986 at other levels that Killarney is part of the national Gaelic games scenery.

Major matches - frequently Munster football finals - between Cork and Kerry are usually a biennial event (although Clare's ditching of Cork broke the sequence this year). Tipperary's hurling famine ended here in 1987. The town has sent out club and colleges All-Ireland champions this decade.

Fitzgerald Stadium in Killarney has just had a major refit with a bank of new terracing facing the O'Sullivan Stand. Sitting on top, the old wooden structure with the open top which gave a sweeping view of the Reeks which dominate the setting has been replaced by a purpose-built press box - with the same view - which the assembled media on Saturday could only look forward to using at some stage in the future.

At some stage in the mists of time past, a dispute (or settlement depending on your point of view) moved the ground out of the hands of the Dr Crokes club but Killarney on Saturday also showed that movements were afoot in that matter.

Dr Crokes are best known as the All-Ireland champions of 1992 and a year after that triumph, they set about developing their own place in the world, across the road - as it happens - from Fitzgerald Stadium.

AT present, there is a lovely pitch recently opened and neatly circumferenced at the focal point of the ground and beside it a £300,000 clubhouse nearing completion. It contains four modern dressingrooms, divided into two units, a treatment room, a gymnasium for winter training, catering facilities and a viewing room - all with wheelchair access.

All sorts of angles are sought out. Terracing will be built on a pile of rubble acquired when a sewer was being upgraded by the local authority which would have had to have paid for its disposal otherwise. Right-of-way access for piping was given to the builder of a block of houses beside the ground - in return for a parcel of land which will allow the juvenile pitch to be widened.

The culture of GAA clubs in this regard is striking. Enormously ambitious plans are taken in hand and through hard work in fund-raising and many other areas of activity, facilities crop up all over the country. Crokes' plans aren't unusual in themselves but for such a long-established club to still have the missionary vigour to undertake such a project is commendable.

Anyone who spends a weekend evening in a pub in Killarney is fair game for the many collectors who buzz around the town with their appropriately wasp-coloured tickets selling participation in the Dr Croke's lotto.

Over the next four or five years, the debt which has been incurred on foot of the development will be paid off. As John Keogh, one of the most forceful ticket-sellers and who supervised all the preparatory work on the site puts it: "If you're not in debt, you're not going anywhere".

Neither the club nor, you feel, the county is open to that accusation.