On Gaelic Games: What has changed in football over the last five years or so? The rise of the two Ulster counties, Armagh and Tyrone?

Sort of, if you disregard the former's two Ulster titles in 1999 and 2000 and their record of being narrowly beaten by the eventual All-Ireland winners three years running and the latter's run of underage success around the same time.

The permanence of Kerry: the only county to have been ever-present in all six All-Ireland semi-finals this decade, winning four and losing two? This was a welcome departure for the county from the threadbare 1990s but they are hardly strangers to long-term domination.

This is the fifth anniversary of the introduction of the qualifiers. Well that was certainly a change. It has transformed the championship and given counties more of an outlet as well as creating additional marketing and promotional opportunities.

Maybe it's ultimately benefited the stronger teams, who now find it easier to be involved at the sharp end of the championship because one ambush doesn't disable them for the entire summer. But there's nothing wrong with that. The best teams should ideally win the biggest prizes.

Hand in hand with this reform came the adoption of the calendar year in the National Football League. That has certainly made a difference, creating a coherent timeframe for the competition and allowing managers and teams a sensible pre-season and, more importantly, a defined off-season when even if they have to top themselves up in the gym, there's no need for collective training and they're free to take a break from the county scene.

It was therefore alarming to hear GAA president Nickey Brennan in his speech to last month's congress conjuring up the spectre of a return to the old days of league fixtures marooned in the autumn just as the buzz of the All-Ireland is lingering and all of seven months before the competition's final.

That's a long time over which to spread, say, the nine matches it took Kerry to win this year's title.

"The árdstiurthóir in his annual report commented on the need to bring the All-Ireland finals forward to accommodate club championships," said Brennan. "I fully support this view and to achieve this objective a tightening up in the provincial championship schedules will be necessary.

"We also need to accommodate meaningful and competitive national leagues, but to deliver this games schedule is it time to reconsider playing some league games in the autumn?"

Mercifully, he was throwing it out more as a topic for discussion than a cast-iron proposal, because it would be unfair on players and a complete regression from the rationally-constructed season currently in operation to a splintered and disconnected format, which would do the much put-upon competition no favours.

If the aspiration is to move the All-Ireland forward then surely the obvious way to gain time in the early months of the year is to scrap the play-off stages of the league and simply decide the competition on the basis of where teams finish.

But what has changed since 2001 is Leinster. The province's decline from joint-owners of a duopoly with Munster to penniless spectators at the All-Ireland series has been precipitous.

The biggest reason for this is the parallel fall of Meath. Since the county reached the All-Ireland final of 2001, no other team from Leinster has managed to do so and only one, Dublin a year later, has even got as far as the semi-finals. Without Meath to drive standards, the province, Dublin included, has suffered.

Meath were the biggest county in football from the mid-1980s to the turn of the century, their four All-Irelands between 1986 and 2000 putting them ahead of even Kerry.

As is often the pattern, the breakthrough of Seán Boylan's team drove an underage revival and the county reached three minor All-Ireland finals in four years, 1990-1993, winning two as well as an under-21 title.

This process of renewal provided 10 players who would win senior All-Irelands later in the decade, and the county looked well set to perpetuate itself.

Much was down to Boylan's ability to keep things fresh and perform little miracles of improvisation.

Graham Geraghty won All Stars in defence and attack. Brendan Reilly lined out at corner back in the 1991 All-Ireland against Down; five years later from full forward he kicked the winning point that eventually beat Mayo.

The catalogue of backs turned into forwards was complemented by examples that went the other way. That same year, 1996, Barry Callaghan - a tough, perceptive forward whose career was subsequently ruined by injury - played at centre forward.

Two years later he gave an immense display at centre back the day Offaly, then Leinster champions and league holders, were annihilated in the first defence of their provincial title.

But the result of this has ultimately been to foster illusions in the county. Ten years ago, the manner in which the county had come from its greatest humiliation in decades by Dublin to winning the All-Ireland a year later with a redeveloped team left a lingering belief in miracles.

For the years that followed the last flowering of Boylan's Meath - the destruction of Kerry in 2001 - the massive defeat by Galway in that year's final was forgotten and annually we were invited "never to write off Meath" and "remember 96 when people thought Carlow would beat them (an urban legend)".

Each succeeding disappointment only increased the anticipation that Meath would bounce back even harder than in 1996. It never happened and now the county faces its first championship without Boylan at the helm since the summer of GUBU 24 years ago.

There are no more graduates of gilded underage teams to bolster a refreshed senior challenge. Maybe the spectacular success of St Patrick's, Navan will eventually fuel a return to the heavens; maybe it will simply continue to demonstrate that colleges football isn't as predictive a phenomenon as underage intercounty.

This weekend the county, having been relegated, face their buoyant neighbours Louth, passing them in the other direction. It's evenly balanced but the mood in Meath drifts between anxiety and fatalism.

That's some difference in five years.