GAA:When Armagh champions Crossmaglen Rangers take on Dr Crokes of Killarney in this year's AIB All-Ireland club football final the weekend after next it will mark a couple of significant anniversaries in five-year increments.

Ten years ago Crossmaglen won the first of what would be three All-Irelands in four years and five years previously Crokes won their first and only title.

Saturday week will also be another crossing of the paths for Oisín McConville and Colm Cooper. It was five years ago in 2002 that they last faced each other in an All-Ireland final at the end of a rookie season that had already marked out Cooper as a major talent.

McConville's day that September was eventful. He missed a penalty just before half-time but recovered in the second half to score the goal that turned the final famously in Armagh's favour. It was one of a number of clashes, the most recent a dramatic quarter-final last August that launched Kerry towards the county's latest All-Ireland.

"We would see them as believing they play perfect football or as close as you can get to it," according to McConville. "Over the years we would have agreed with that. But we don't have any feelings of inferiority and certainly not at club level."

Cooper's goals this campaign have been unobtrusive as a stiletto thrust and just as lethal, making a mark against Nemo Rangers, the Nire and Moorefield. Yet he says the club championship exerts less pressure on him than the county.

"When you're involved with Kerry, there's a huge expectation and it's not as much with the club. They've never put any extra expectation on me. Everyone on the team has a job to do and I've never been asked to do anything extra. I tend not to drop back playing for Kerry but at times I have to do it with the club but it shows how much hard work we're all willing to put in."

Fifteen years ago he was the Crokes club mascot at Croke Park when his brothers, Danny and Mark, were involved with the team. Top scorer that year was current coach and Kerry manager Pat O'Shea.

Club member John Keogh recalled how the eight-year-old Cooper took to the field with the team and gave goalkeeper Peter O'Brien some shot practice and eventually began to try his patience.

"He gave out to him because Cooper was undermining his confidence - one shot in the top corner, another in the bottom corner. So he told him to get off the field and stop undermining him. Eventually the stewards arrived and took him off when he was trying to join the team parade."

The prodigy's memory is vaguer but he has a sense of his carefree attitude. "It was very different back then. I was about eight and didn't realise how big the club competition was even though I'd two brothers playing."

He remembers in greater detail the last time he faced an Armagh side in an All-Ireland final. "I've played Armagh at intercounty and they've always been tough matches. I remember 2002. We don't do things too easily in Kerry and having been four up at half-time, we were dominated by them."

For McConville, who hasn't missed a single club championship match for Crossmaglen since the south Armagh club's unbeaten county championship run began 12 years ago - an unbroken sequence he estimates to stand at "between 60 and 80 games" - the club's success helped redefine the county's ambitions.

"We had become similar to Mayo, I suppose. Armagh went to Croke Park and came home beaten but the club experience was a positive one and gave you a sense of belief."

Now a veteran in a team regenerated by an influx of younger talent, he finds the return to the club final for the first time in seven years is an even more satisfying achievement than it was during the club's heyday.

"It means everything because I'd thought our days of being in Croke Park on Paddy's Day were over. But there's a new focus, a new emphasis, a new enthusiasm.

"For me personally you appreciate things more when you're older. Back in 1996-'97 I might have been expecting this all the time."

Cooper has played in four All-Ireland finals, breaking even in terms of success and disappointment, but Saturday week is his first with club. He talks up Crossmaglen and their phenomenal tradition in the championship. For once this isn't the predictably implausible bid for outsider status - that has already been acknowledged and conferred by the bookies. But that's all he's conceding.

"It's my first time going to Croke Park as underdog," he says, "so the pressure's off but we have our own expectations of how we would like to perform."