A Sunday in springtime. The sun beating down on a hard wee pitch at the bottom of a housing estate in Mullingar. St Joseph's CBS of Fairview and Summerhill College of Sligo are playing in the All-Ireland schools soccer final.

It is a post-Ban world. Indeed the kids weaving the patterns on the grass scarcely know the legacy of Rule 27, the GAA's infamous foreign games ban. Summerhill have seven Connacht colleges Gaelic football titles to their credit, the last 14 years ago. St Joseph's are former All-Ireland champions at Gaelic football.

Both schools have a history of churning out All-Ireland medal winners. But that was then . . . Joeys are the All-Ireland soccer champions and for the second season on the bounce they are about to beat Summerhill College in the national final. On the sideline Brendan Leahy, a GAA man from Kerry, prompts the Dublin kids and David Pugh, the first and most famous multi-denominationalist after the Ban, nudges the Summerhill boys.

David Pugh, in the literal and metaphorical sense, was once the fair-haired boy of the Sligo soccer scene. Sligo is a garrison town, a historical quirk which seems to adequately account for the town's determined preference for soccer over Gaelic football. No matter how stoically Sligo Rovers make their following suffer, the loyalty remains undiminished.

The county Gaelic footballers, who have been able to offer 17 championship games in 10 seasons, have their constituency in the countryside. The county has 51 GAA clubs, three of them in the town of Sligo and those three populated in the general imagination at least by blow-in teachers and students and council workers.

This week Sligo's GAA population worried quietly about their prospects at home to the All-Ireland champions Galway. Sligo haven't beaten Galway since the annus mirabilis of 1975 when they went on to suffer the singular misfortune of sauntering, happy and hapless, into the path of the finest young team ever to emerge from Kerry or any other county.

No matter. In Sligo people always said that the 1971 team was better - 1975 was a last roundup, an appendix to a life-span of unfulfilled promise.

The famous 1971 team. It should be remembered that in Easter of that year when the GAA gathered in Queen's University there to debate the possible passing of the most bitterly resented Rule 27, only two counties ended up voting against removing the Ban - Antrim and Sligo.

A couple of months later in one of those ironic little twists which must have given hernias to the hard-liners, Sligo picked two professional soccer players to play for them in the championship. David Pugh and Gerry Mitchell.

David Pugh is a quiet man and nothing about him suggests that he has a headful of memories which are golden. Gerry Mitchell is more gregarious but likes to defer to David Pugh when it comes to talking about the good old days. "People say we're great fellas now that we're old and retired," says Gerry Mitchell. "But we were never great when we played. I wasn't anyway. Pughy was always the one with the talent."

For both of them the progress from soccer stardom to inter-county football wasn't a conversion, more a kind of homecoming. Pugh and Mitchell were both schooled in St John's, the Marist school in Sligo. They played Gaelic football there as a matter of course. Played and were well coached.

"We were coached," says Mitchell, "by a great man called Brother Francis. His real name was Paddy McGovern and he came from Gurteen but we knew him as Brother Francis. He runs a school in Athlone now. A good man. He taught us the basics.

Outside of St John's though, Sligo was still a vibrant soccer town. At school they played one game. At home they played another.

"You came to 16, 17 or 18 and you went one way or another," says Pugh. "Most of us being from Sligo we went for soccer."

Pugh was offered terms at Celtic as a kid but had stayed on in school to do his Leaving Certificate, a decision he has never regretted.

By the time Brendan McCauley, Sigo's manager in 1971, came calling for Pugh he had lived a little. He wrung several famous seasons out of Sligo Rovers including the heart-breaking three-game cup tie against Bohemians in 1971. He won a Cup winner's medal with Shamrock Rovers and represented the League of Ireland. And he played for a year in America. 1968 in Boston. A great time to be young and in the States if not a great time to be a soccer player there.

"I played one year full-time with a team called the Boston Beacons. We were a gathering of the nations. The bulk of the lads were from Denmark. That was when Denmark wasn't a force. We'd five Danish internationals - all pathetic - then Irish, English, South American, Spanish and what have you. "

He shared a flat with Paddy Mulligan and the two of them lived the life of evangelists conducting soccer clinics in local schools, preparing soccer for the great leap forward. There were moments to lock away.

On one occasion Pugh got to play against Santos and Pele. Almost pulled off a jersey swap which would have secured him the sacred white number 10 jersey, but somebody had worked out a deal with Pele earlier. Pugh was left with a few dozens photos. Who's that with David Pugh?

He came back and played with Shamrock Rovers and then went to the training college in Belfast for whom he was playing Gaelic football in Croke Park against UCD when speculation about an inter-county career playing Gaelic first began.

"I was in Joseph's, the training college in Belfast under Jim McKeever, and they had the Congress in Antrim in Queen's that Easter. The only counties voting against it were Sligo and Antrim. Then a few weeks later myself and Gerry got picked for a Connacht championship game against Roscommon. We were made very welcome by most of the people. Some hard cases didn't accept us. There was a fuss and some surprise but not a lot of protest."

Gerry Mitchell's journey was more straight-forward. Soccer started for him with the under-12s and so on.

"Pughy was with Collegians in Sligo after school. I played a bit with St Joseph's, The Stars and Glenglue. Then we played together again with Sligo Rovers for a good while. We became good friends and he was best man at my wedding. I followed along after Pughy. The teams would be picked by committees. The old committees would pick Pughy. I think it was only when the fulltime managers came I became a regular.

Sligo Rovers were enjoying one of the more memorable periods in their up-and-down history. In 1967, Tony Bartley had become ther first manager to be allowed sole charge of team selection. Bartley was gone by the time of the infamous 1970 FAI Cup final though.

"We got a bit of a run," says Mitchell. "There was a thing going at that stage, the Blaxnit Cup, four teams form the north and four from the south. We beat Derry City, Ballymena (the day before Jim Clarke left to play for Middlesbrough) and lost a two-legged game with Glentoran, won in Windsor, lost in Dalymount. Then we got to the FAI Cup final. We ended up beaten in the second replay with Bohs."

When the ban went both players happily resumed the Gaelic football careers they had abandoned in their teens. They joined St Mary's in Sligo Town.

Pugh and Mitchell's call to the county colours was a success. The Irish Times noted archly that the pair "might bring some delicacy to the Sligo attack". They brought more than that but first there were a couple of hurdles to clear.

The surface differences between the two sports were obvious but . . . "the priest coming into the dressing-room to bless the team beforehand, that was something which surprised me" says David Pugh "and the hype in the dressing-room. Soccer dressing-rooms were always fairly calm. In the Gaelic they were a lot more vigorous, shouting and roaring and the rest of the stuff, very enthusiastic."

The vigorous enthusiasm of the GAA boys would leave its mark. Pugh remembers playing a National League semi-final against Offaly in Croke Park around that period and being hit five times before he had touched the ball.

Mitchell's memory strangely enough is of lack of enthusiasm. "Lads were very slow to come training," he remembers. "Myself and Pughy, we were training in the Showgrounds at this stage. We'd have soccer training early, then leave and head to the Gaelic ground. We used leave training in the Showgrounds and we'd be first up in the other place and nobody would be there. We'd wonder if had the right place.

"The lads used to drift in. And then, in fairness, when they got going on the pitch they'd work hard. There was a different attitude though."

Pugh and Mitchell both remember the fuss their arrival caused but neither can recall any dissent within the Sligo team itself. Brendan McCauley, the manager at the time, was firm in his decision and most of the players saw McCauley as a serious football man.

Beyond the dressing-room door the debate raged surely enough. County board members were vocal in the Sligo Champion, hard-liners saw it as a black day. The business on the field settled arguments. In 1971, Sligo had much their best team in living memory.

"We beat Roscommon handily enough in Hyde Park," says Mitchell. The margin was two points but Pugh, Mitchell and Mickey Kearins, a genius just then in his prime, tormented Johnny Neill the Roscommon goalie all afternoon without beating him.

Sligo moved on to a provincial final with Galway, the county working up a head of steam as the prospect of the first provincial title since 1928 loomed. It was not to be but the ride was worth while. In the drawn game the two soccer refugees were overshadowed by a virtuoso performance from Mickey Kearins of Dromard who scored 13 points (five from play), the last in the 80th minute of play to secure a draw for his side. Pugh, playing at centre forward, set up Sligo's two goals on the day.

In the replay Kearins was limited to seven points but Mitchell and Pugh scored freely. Mitchell had 2-1 on his account by the time Pugh produced a goal which is still talked about.

"Listen," he says diluting laughter with modesty, "that was the greatest fluke ever. A 14 yards free, two or three minutes to go, I put the ball down, took about a 100-yard run and hit it. It could have gone anywhere but it rocketed into the roof of the net. One of the biggest flukes you've ever seen. There were about 40 of them on the line." Pugh's goal brought Sligo back to within a point of Galway. Not enough. It would take another four years before Sligo would escape Connacht. By the end of 1971 the strange careers of Pugh and Mitchell had taken another twist. Ken Turner was dismissed as Sligo manager and Pugh and Mitchell took over as joint managers for a year. They continued to play Gaelic football.

Early this week the Sligo selectors sat down and studied the form for tomorrow's game with Galway. They picked a championship debutant, Sean Flannery, at corner forward.

Flannery is a striker with Sligo Rovers, one of the better teenagers in the domestic leagues and has been a part of various international squads put together by Brian Kerr.

His inclusion sparked some discussion in Sligo as to his soccer form this year. Around the Showgrounds some of the regulars felt that training with the Sligo under-21 side and the county footballers had taken a bit of bulk off Flannery. The bulk had suited him well playing for Rovers.

Food for thought but nobody batted an eyelid at the dual commitment. Nothing daring about having a Rover wearing white. Just some worry in the town about how it might affect his soccer.

"I honestly think there isn't much can be done," says Pugh. " Not here in the town. It's inbred in us, the soccer kids look at Gaelic and they tell you that you can keep it. Some will play it but it's second to soccer. It's a soccer town. It will always be a soccer town."