Locker Room:Is it nurture or nature? Does it really matter? Not when it comes to Kerry.

At just after six o'clock yesterday evening Croke Park lay quiet and eerily empty save for the odd steward loitering in the stands and us press drones pecking our keyboards high in the Hogan. The field itself was disfigured with an acne of litter and no heed was paid as Kieran Donaghy dandered across the grass to a corner of the stadium with the Sam Maguire dangling idly from his hands.

Minutes earlier in a corner of the Kerry dressingroom Donaghy had been the recipient of a crushing bear hug from Jack O'Shea and seeing the two of them briefly locked together reminded one of the unique lineage of Kerry football. The Sam Maguire was free to go walkabout with Kieran Donaghy because in a way it is incidental to Kerry's business.

Being the best at football and being the best more years than anyone else is what it life is all about in Kerry. A beautiful and quiet obsession. There are no fetishes about the trophy and no licence for a bigger hat size comes with having got your hands on it.

Football just means more in Kerry than it means anywhere else. And when a sport touches the heart of a place and becomes itself a from of self-expression it makes redundant the need for development squads and five-year plans. Children just grow into men with a football as their best friend.

An old teacher of mine used to tell a story about asking an old footballer in Kerry what it meant to have an All-Ireland medal. There was a pause and finally an answer: "Yerra, I'd have five of them and I suppose there'd be a small bit more thought of me than a man who'd only have the four."

Donaghy has two All-Ireland medals and has won them back to back and despite having had the nickname Star stapled on to him some time ago he would be the first to concede that in Kerry there is a small bit more thought of Jacko than himself. And Jacko in turn would quietly plead that all his medals and All Stars hardly turned him into a Charlie Big Potatoes.

There is an innate modesty about Kerry football which demands that it is the business of others to make assumptions and connections.

Donaghy and Jacko are soul brothers in some respects, easy-going beacons of excellence in teams filled with quiet zealots. They stand out from their respective eras like sore thumbs. Charlie Nelligan, who roomed with Jacko back in the day, likes to tell stories about his friend's demeanour on the Saturday nights of those All-Ireland weekends when the nerves would be choking Nelligan and Jacko would lie in splendid repose in the other bed reading the early editions of the Sunday newspapers and cackling at any unfavourable mentions which caught his fancy.

On the following morning Charlie would get up and fretfully pull open the curtains to survey the elements.

"Jacko, it's lashing rain!"

"Is it! Perfect. I was hoping for rain."

Same again the following year.

"Jacko. It's so hot and sunny out."

"Is it! Perfect. Exactly what I was hoping for."

And then Jacko would get up and amble down for a game of pitch and putt in Malahide before heading to Croke Park and waving to his friends from the parade.

You can imagine the same stories being told about Kieran Donaghy in decades to come. Donaghy has the same louche appeal, the same happy, wide-eyed approach to life. Apart from his extraordinary attributes as a player he is the type of character every team needs. He takes life on the bounce. His description of his goals yesterday was characteristic of his breed. Insisting, as all Kerry players do after their gaiscí have been completed, that he was very fortunate indeed he went on to describe the scores with his usual touches of comedy and mock boasting.

The first, "I stole the ball. I had to check myself. I got a fright. Said to myself 'am I gone mad? There's no goalie'. It was just unfortunate for them. It broke for me. Fortunate enough."

And the second.

"I've been telling the lads, I don't think Drogba could have swivelled any better to finish it!"

Of course the links between Jacko and Donaghy run deeper. Jacko played in 1978, the last time I can remember any Kerry player scoring a goal into an untended net in an All-Ireland final. Paddy Cullen's phone may ring a little less often now with requests to recount how Mikey Sheehy wiped his eye 29 years ago.

Kerry are easy winners to like and to appreciate and not just because of the box-office appeal of men like Jacko and Star. Yesterday their native genius found its purest expression in the jinking confidence of the Gooch, whose display surely puts an end to all debate as to whether he should get past the ropes into the pantheon of the greats.

But that cutting edge was backed up with an extraordinary work-rate.

As Darragh Ó Sé commented afterwards, it was Kerry's halfbacks and half-forwards who handed their colleagues the game with an extraordinary afternoon of sweat and commitment. We see the carrot-topped tip of the iceberg but scarcely notice what lies beneath.

Watching Paul Galvin, who gets cast as the bad guy in every western movie, would have been instructive for any young player. His chasing, his harrying, his tackling and his distribution are extraordinary. He has become one of those players whom referees get bonus points and a bit of a panto cheer for booking but there isn't a team in the country who wouldn't yearn for his presence.

Again listening to him speak afterwards was interesting for anyone wishing to understand what makes Kerry football different.

"Fear of losing to Cork was the key," said Galvin.

"I felt myself that everything Kerry football stood for was on the line today. Everything we have achieved in the last four or five years and the last one hundred years was on the line. We had a meeting last night and I looked around me and knew we couldn't lose this.

"We hit them with huge force early on like. For me it is all about medals. I want to win as many medals as I can while I'm playing. The fact that it was Cork meant that defeat wasn't an option. No way we could leave the people of Kerry down. We wouldn't be let back into the county."

In a team where the tendency is to play down everything, to approach every game in the same state of mind as the last one, to play the match and not the occasion, as the sports psychologists say, here was a player who was raising the stakes in his head to the point where the entire history and culture of Kerry football was on the line for 70 minutes. And then going out and playing to that level.

It means more. We'll never know if it is nurture or nature but we know that Kieran Donaghy's two goals had nothing to do with luck and lots to do with persistence and with putting his body on the line and we know that Paul Galvin came to Croke Park with a sense of the big picture that almost any other player would be afraid of. And he addressed it there and then.

It just means more. You can see it in the Ó Sés, in the quiet dignity of Declan O'Sullivan, in Galvin's defiance and Donaghy's self-deprecation. Dynasties (and that's what this team have become) shouldn't be so easy to like.