On Wednesday afternoon after school they went down to the field as usual. One football pitch. Two footballs. Three men. Same old routine. Kieran McCarthy stood behind the goals. Ned Fitzgerald stood sentry. Maurice Fitzgerald popped and pepped. He slotted penalties, raced on to hopping balls, clipped frees, scored points. No opposition, but then he often makes it look that way.

The comforts of routine. When proof of his greatness first presented itself to them in this far-flung finger of the Kingdom they could scarcely have imagined that he would be 27 before he graced an All-Ireland final.

Life rolls on though and Fitzgerald just does what he has always done. And now that Kerry football looks like almost matching his own level of excellence perhaps Fitzgerald is about to come into his personal kingdom.

They tell him that he was about the place, kicking a ball when he was two or three years old. His skills are the best adverts for the truth of that but he is breezily dismissive of myth-makers: "Two or three years old. Maybe it's true but these are memories I just don't have."

Maurice Fitzgerald talking. A crowd of journalists gather around. It is not that it is done well, rather that it is done at all. Maurice Fitz submitting thoughts to be shackled between inverted commas and shunted into print. It is the first time he has done this and, gracious though he is, Fitzgerald is not offering up very important thoughts. He has a natural mastery of press-night banter. He hoards the deeper thoughts as supplements to his own keen sense of perspective.

So, on the past 10 years . . .

"I haven't any outstanding memories as such. I just enjoy football."

On pressure . . .

"People say a lot of things. If you were to think about them you wouldn't bother playing."

On Niall Cahalane . . .

"Not worth talking about. We have a good enough relationship and we had a few tussles."

More than any sportsperson you can think of, Fitzgerald has given life to the old cliche about letting his football do the talking. The memories people have of him and the anecdotes they circulate about him all take place on football pitches.

"He has a great sense of humour," says one former Kerry manager about him. "But he doesn't say much. You just know by the little smile on his face that he sees the funny side of a lot of things. He'd know spoofing when he heard it."

His quiet genius only advertises itself through one medium. In conversation he ducks and weaves and rations the opinions and anecdotes out but he has an immensely likeable way of doing it.

"Do you not enjoy this?"

Grimaces.

"Do I look as if I don't?"

"Yes"

"Should I smile more?"

Smiles. "Yes."

"I don't really like to spend all my time talking . . . What ye write is ye're own business. I won't be reading it in the next week."

"You'll miss the Hemingway prose."

"Yerra. I don't understand most of it."

When you talk about Fitzgerald you talk about football, the sole currency of his fame.

Kieran McCarthy, his friend and training partner from Cahirciveen, remembers his first sighting of Fitzgerald. An under-12 final in the gloam of Waterville and here was this elegant splinter of a boy "kicking balls over the bar from out near the halfway line. We had never seen anything like him."

A childhood spent with a football as his Siamese twin had made him the most sweetly two-footed, the most graceful and balletic of Gaelic footballers. Already the elegance of his play was setting him aside from the rough and tumble game around him. He has been a phenomenon ever since, the more so for having grown to maturity in a uniquely fallow period of Kerry football history. He burst on to the national consciousness scoring 10 points in a foul-tempered Munster final in Pairc Ui Chaoimh in 1988, endearing himself to trivia buffs by winning his first All Star before he had played in Croke Park. "I think it's time to pull down the tent and move on," Eoin Liston had said a year earlier in Killarney. "The circus is over. It's time for a new act."

Fitzgerald fitted right in at top of the bill. He looked like the footballer who would guarantee Kerry's footballing dominion. Yet he was virtually the only graduate from the dysfunctional generation who grew up in that hothouse of ceaseless success which was Kerry football in the 1970s and 80s. Any wonder? The links are direct. Jack O'Shea was a clubmate in Cahirciveen as he grew towards adulthood, or the seniors as that stage of life is called in Kerry. Jacko ushered the young Fitzgerald into the senior ranks.

"The first senior game I played was against Mayo. Jacko was in the dressing-room and he came over and he looked after me. He was a great source of inspiration for me and made it easy to fit in. I played centre forward on Willie Joe Padden that day. I think. I'm not a great man for statistics or dates. I remember more about Jacko."

He is adamant that growing up in Cahirciveen he was no different to any other young fella in terms of his singular devotion to the science of Gaelic football. The glinting extravagance of his genius makes you wonder, but then this is the same few square miles from which Mick O'Connell, Mick O'Dwyer and Jack O'Shea were also harvested.

He has an acute grasp of his Kerry lineage and a respect for his footballing heritage. Last week in the field in Cahirciveen he took three penalties in a row on Kieran McCarthy and each cannoned off the left hand post.

"You know," he told McCarthy, "Jacko says the best penalty he ever took was in the 1986 final with Tyrone. Came back off the wood too."

He grew up tugging the sleeves of great football men. Mick O'Connell was a friend and fishing partner of his father Ned. Young Maurice has many of O'Connell's traits, not least the fluency with both feet.

"There would be an influence," says Mickey Ned O'Sullivan who managed Fitzgerald in his formative years as a senior. "He would have Mick O'Connell's suspicion of the limelight and the same devotion to solitary training, working on the skills. They are different players but they both bring a lot to the aesthetic of the game."

Passing fluently through the underage ranks, his extraordinary skills were sufficient for him to make an impact which brought him fame around the footballing places of Munster. In Cahirciveen they remember one incident in a needle minor match in Sneem on a Good Friday evening. Cahirciveen were playing a Sneem/Derrynane combination and a good crowd had gathered to survey the future of their clubs.

There was one Sneem mentor buzzing along the Cahirciveen line, marking the Cahirciveen mentors as it were. Getting in the way and running the game if not his mouth. Late on Fitzgerald had a free-kick out on that touchline. The game hung for the taking. The Sneem man chipped in helpfully.

"Not a chance," he said. "Not a hope Fitzie."

Without looking back, Fitzgerald launched a huge kick, the effort leaving him sitting on his backside in the mud. And the ball? Well they wouldn't still be telling the story if it hadn't split the posts and shifted the smiles off Sneem faces.

Those stories come at you in sprightly battalions when you ask about Fitzgerald. A minor championship game against Cork in the mid-1980s when he kicked successive 45s, one with his left foot and one with his right foot.

As a fresher in UCC he dragged the college to the Sigerson Cup. The finals were played in Maynooth, Quarter-finals on Friday, semi-finals on Saturday, final on Sunday. UCC scored 1-28 in the course of the three games. Fitzgerald scored 1-17 of that. They played Jordanstown in the quarter-final and of the 13 points they scored, 12 were Fitzgerald's.

OR THERE was the Cork county championship game with Glanmire in 1988 when he was under pressure from Kerry not to play in view of a pending senior championship game with Tipperary.

UCC got into trouble and were trailing by nine points at half-time. They brought on Maurice Fitz. He scored 2-5. The Glanmire goalkeeper pulled off a wonderful save in the last minute of the game to prevent it from being 3-5. Glanmire won by a point. What about one of Ned Fitzgerald's favourites, the first game of a three-match Cork county championship epic with Duhallow. Last minute, last kick and the pressure is bubbling. Cork people don't like Kerrymen coming over their borders to colonise the county championship. UCC were trailing by a point. From 55 yards out hugging the right touchline, Maurice Fitz popped one over. Broke a few hearts.

While he was in Cork his value to Kerry was such that different Kerrymen living in the county took it in turns each night to drive him across the border to training in Tralee.

Every team he has played on has had to adopt a policy of switching the defenders who mark him in training. They become dangerously demoralised or dangerously frustrated.

"He does incredible things when he trains," says Des Callinan who trained him in college. "It can look insulting or arrogant when he swings a point over from one wing and then swings another over from the other wing with the other foot. It looks so easy for him that you'd think he was destroying the defender without even trying. He has some style."

He has guts too, as he demonstrated in a derby game for St Mary's of Cahirciveen against St Michael's from just outside the town. A South Kerry final with bragging rights at stake. After five minutes he took a tumble and broke his wrist. He scored nine points anyway and had a mind to play for Kerry against Kildare the next day if the hospital hadn't put the idea right out of his head.

In the Kerry colours the moments of genius have been plentiful too. Before 1993 he had seldom had a bad game against Cork. Indeed in 1992 he had what might have been his greatest day when he scored 1-8 on Niall Cahalane in Pairc Ui Chaoimh.

"He's a forward that can make a back look very stupid," said Cahalane this week. "It was a humiliation. When he hits form though nobody can live with him. He has the physique of a midfielder but the qualities of a great 5' 6" corner forward."

That physique wasn't easily come by. Mickey Ned O'Sullivan put him on a course of weights in the late 1980s and saw slight but unspectacular improvements. He suffered, largely in silence, at the hands of lesser players. In Belfast, in the Sigerson Cup final of 1989, he got exceptionally rough treatment from a St Mary's side who had identified him rightly as UCC's best threat. An early challenge from behind left him with severe concussion and damaged neck ligaments. Subsequently UCC made a complaint to the GAC but the video evidence was inconclusive.

On a frustrating day later that year in Killarney he was involved in a fractious league game against Cork.

Pushed to the limit he retaliated and got sent off. Ironically he was called up by the GAC to explain himself.

Four years ago Fitzgerald came to see the value of Mickey Ned's advice about upper body weight and set about building himself up.

"He was having trouble getting past people with strength," says Kieran McCarthy. "He came to me one October night four years ago and said he wanted to build himself up. We got some advice from John O'Keeffe and then we set up a sort of gym down in the field and the pair of us went at it."

McCarthy matched Fitzgerald for a while but the determination of the younger man astonished him. From a starting point of being barely able to manage 10 pull-ups Fitzgerald was soon getting his chin up over the metal 50 or 60 times. In December that year they trained 26 nights out of the 31.

"I remember we used to go for runs down to a place off the White Strand," says McCarthy. "A secluded place like a big farmland maybe six times the size of a football field right down facing the Atlantic Ocean. It was all we could do to manage two circuits of it. Maybe we'd build up for three. One night Maurice just pulled away and did five rounds. He decided one morning he hadn't the engine that other players had. He just went out and did what he had to."

The difference in his game has been evident. "Backs run straight into him now," says Mickey Ned O'Sullivan. "He has developed this talent as well for riding with the momentum of the tackle rather than taking the impact."

"He could always get past players with his skill," says John O'Keeffe. "But now in the situations when it is needed he can go past with his strength as well. He has more options."

Other things have changed too. In the dressing-room he has stepped up his level of influence from a position of almost unbroken silence. Underneath the placid surface is an intense football man.

At a team meeting before the 1991 Munster final the Kerry management had the high-risk idea of asking the four quietest members of the team to make the most substantial contributions. The outstanding memory of the night is Fitzgerald standing up second, his distinct unease soon fading away as the quietly passionate words began flowing out, and in the controlled intensity there was the evidence of what it all meant to him.

"I think we came close that summer," says Fitzgerald himself. "If you look at the All-Ireland semifinal we hit the crossbar twice and missed a few scores. Peter Withnell scored two goals. It was one of those games which could have gone either way. Then the next year we lost to Clare and we have had to pick up the pieces since."

He has become a better footballer since then, building muscle and intensity into his game. Mutual acceptance between himself and Paidi O Se has been one of the keys to current contentment. For tomorrow, with Billy O'Shea expected to buzz around midfield, the space has been cleared in the full forward line for Fitzgerald to claim his piece of history.

With a soft smile he denies feeling the pressure of being the most skilful player in the country on the threshold of the biggest honour. He may not be lying. In the years when Kerry tried to build a team which he could drag to an All-Ireland, Fitzgerald steadfastly tended to his own excellence. This week in the local field he could be found doing the same.

"He wasn't a man to take the game by the scruff of the neck but he knows his ability. As we say in Kerry `you have to know you are good to be great but when you think you are great you are finished.' "

And Fitzgerald knows he's good?

"Ah," says Maurice Fitz with a smile, "Take a look at the forwards, who is first off on any team? Number 15. Always."

In Kerry they will allow their number 15 his little joke. They know better though. They know that Maurice Fitz has been waiting all his life for this day to come. Croke Park is a blank page awaiting his poetry.