Dublin and Meath may not have the strict relevance to football's glittering prizes the fixture once had, but there won't be a better-attended or more evocative match this weekend. The counties' history with each other isn't by any means a modern phenomenon, but it's only in the past three decades that the fixture has become perennial box office. This weekend carries an emphasis on the ordinary.

Neither side holds the Leinster title, and this is the first time this has happened outside of a provincial final since 1983, the year Seán Boylan took over as manager of Meath.

Over those 23 seasons, Boylan will by Sunday evening have taken his side into championship matches with Dublin in all but six of his years in charge. The match in four days will be the 21st time - including four replays - he has prepared for the neighbouring challenge.

Paul Caffrey will be the ninth Dublin manager to pit his wits against Boylan, and most of his predecessors have come out of it on the wrong side. Only two have a 100 per cent record: Caffrey's predecessor, Tommy Lyons - albeit on the basis of one meeting - and Pat O'Neill, whose tenure saw the county unbeaten in Leinster and getting the better of Meath in each of the three years.

Kevin Heffernan was unbeaten in the two years that overlapped with Boylan, drawing one match and winning two.

Gerry McCaul was probably the unluckiest Dublin manager. His four-year spell in charge coincided with Meath's strongest period, 1987-90, featuring back-to-back All-Irelands and a narrow loss against Cork. Even so, McCaul managed one provincial title in 1989.

Three Dublin managers drew blanks against Boylan: the managerial triumvirate of Brian Mullins, Robbie Kelleher and Seán Doherty, who took charge in 1986; Mickey Whelan, who was manager in the 1996 and '97 championships and came across Meath both years; and Tom Carr, whose teams lost Leinster finals to Boylan in 1999 and 2001.

McCaul and Paddy Cullen had the most cracks, four each, at Meath, although Cullen's were all in the space of a little over a month in the famous draw and three replays of 1991.

The view that whoever wins on Sunday will draw sufficient momentum out of it to go on to win the province is supported by precedent. Only once in all of Boylan's years have the winners of a Dublin-Meath championship tie failed to win Leinster. Allow for the fact that over the 14 years up until 1997 the title was won by either county - merely confirmation they were the best teams in the province - and there's still the eight-year period since when Leinster has become a lot more competitive.

The obsessive nature of the relationship at first puzzled the Dublin management teams of the early 1990s. Cullen, O'Neill and selectors Jim Brogan, Fran Ryder and Bobby Doyle could never figure out why their players were so apprehensive about Meath - a county that had never figured large on the screen in their 1970s playing days, apart from a close-run thing in 1976.

The players, on the other hand, couldn't understand why the management got so worked up over Mick O'Dwyer, considering they had never known a moment's unease in Kildare's company.

But both points of view got their comeuppance, first with the 1991 series and then with the rise of Kildare later in the decade. Dublin went into that championship 14 years ago as recent National League winners, confident that all the neuroses about Meath had been laid to rest.

There had been a straw in the wind the previous March in the league match between the counties, a largely forgotten draw. Liam Hayes recorded at the time that Dublin had seemed edgy in Meath's company and hesitant even when they had moved into the lead - as if they were waiting for their opponents to come back at them.

It happened again in the summer. Only in the second match did Dublin have to come back; the others they let slip.

The experience certainly seemed to register with O'Neill and Brogan, who had been selectors with Cullen and stayed involved in the succeeding management.

After their team had wrought vengeance of sorts in 1993 - a last-second Jack Sheedy point averted another draw - Brogan said that it wasn't so much a monkey off their back as a gorilla.

If anything, O'Neill's management ended up over-compensating in the face of the challenge and acknowledged in 1995 that they had erred in peaking so early for Meath in the Leinster final.

That approach led to the biggest win over their rivals since Kevin Heffernan had roved out of the fixed full-forward position 40 years previously to hand the reigning All-Ireland champions a 20-point beating and in the process destroyed the great Meath full back Paddy O'Brien.

But it also led to a tired team that faded incrementally through August and was lucky to escape with the All-Ireland a month later.

Dublin believed, not unreasonably, that Meath wouldn't easily recover from a trimming like that and would be down for another few years. It didn't work out that way, and within 12 months a redeveloped Meath side had dethroned the champions.

It became fashionable to claim that Meath had been underdogs against Carlow that season before going on to win Boylan's third All-Ireland. That wasn't true, but the scale of the achievement was unexpected.

Boylan's favourite memory from the 23 years is the 1986 Leinster final, the first won by the county in 16 years and his first. Dublin weren't hectic that year, but it was a huge breakthrough for Meath and kick-started an era of dominance that produced five provincial titles in six years.

Nearly 20 years on, and after a few barren championships, success this summer would be nearly as welcome.

Time will tell what happens to this Sunday's winners, but the appeal of the fixture endures. Boylan says that it is partly based on the inter-mingling of the counties and the multiple interfaces that have come about through the expansion of the capital.

Nowadays Dubliners live in Meath and Meath people come to work in the city. But there'll be no mistaking who's who on Sunday afternoon.