Tom Humphries finds the Kerry star unfazed by the tabloids but wary of Saturday's papers.
Darragh Ó Sé has had one of those summers where much has been said about him but nothing proved apart from his return to excellence.
Cynical football! Walkouts! Much more! He has been named in connection with everything except the disappearance of Shergar. Ó Sé though has played more championship time than any Kerryman in football. Not much about life in the big leagues surprises him anymore.
"I like to add to it when people tell me these things they've heard. People will tell me some yarn and ask is that true. It's enough just to shake the old head and say sure that's not half of it. You've only got the tip of the iceberg there. It's gone beyond a joke at that stage when I get to hear about it so I might as well leave it grow a few legs.
"Kerry people love talking about football and a good 'bad' story is as good as a good 'good' story. There was one this summer doing the rounds involving myself and the Gooch. If we did what we were supposed to do we were right tough men. You wouldn't want to be sensitive."
He settles back into the armchair and gives a big, disarming grin.
"So what kind of questions have you got anyway?" He chuckles because we are speaking the day after his by-now-celebrated appearance at the press conference to launch the Kilmacud Sevens football tournament. Even by the Kingdom's exalted standards of genially saying, well, yerra, nothing really, it was a tour de force.
"I would have spoken about it all fine after the Crokes stuff," he says, "but one of the lads comes bombing in with these questions straight off about the final, so I said I'd leave the boys suffer. I know it wasn't ground-breaking stuff but still I picked up a tabloid today and it says in a headline, 'Ó Sé says tough games will stand to us.'
"What can you do? I don't mind TV and radio because people see the context you say things in. I don't like all that drama at the top of the page."
He has been schooled well. He works as a partner in a successful Tralee auctioneering firm and his neighbours in the few-hundred yards of business space in that part of town include Mikey Sheehy, Seánie Walsh, Charlie Nelligan and Eoin Liston. Whether he is out west, as he calls home, or in Tralee, he's never short of advice or anecdotes.
Out west. With the brothers Fergal, Tomás and Marc he grew up on Ireland's most famous crossroads: Ard an Bhothair in Ventry, outside An Daingean. Mount Eagle in the background. Páidí next door.
Darragh arrived in 1975, the year Páidí won his first All-Ireland medal. Darragh's first All-Ireland as a travelling fan was 1982. As a young footballer Darragh was no genius but he met the scholars.
Schooling was done first in Cill Mhic an Domhnaigh, where there were 28 children in the entire school, and An Daingean CBS, where Liam Higgins took up the burden of moulding him as a footballer. No prodigy but the benefits of breeding and nurture were always going to stand to him.
"Tradition, I suppose. We all grew up the same, playing our All-Irelands in the back garden. The usual shenanigans. I was average enough till I made the Kerry minors. I wasn't good enough the first year - made it the last year I was eligible.
"I was lucky. I grew a lot in that last year. Ogie (Moran) brought me into the panel then and they've been trying to get rid of me since."
He remembers Kerry's lap-of-honour three-in-a-row in the mid-80s but remembers even more keenly the famine that followed. He appreciates what is there now. He's not a man for looking back in anger or in sentiment.
"People ask if beating Armagh this year was something special for me. It wasn't. You can read a lot into these things. It's about winning. It doesn't matter if you beat Kilkenny footballers in the All-Ireland final. It's about the winning. They'd say the same in Mayo."
But surely the defeat to Armagh in 2002 - seminal as it was in terms of Kerry's rude introduction to the Northerners' robust, blanket defence - made that a significant year personally for Ó Sé, having lost his father, Mícheál, that summer and having been captain of the team?
"Yerra, listen, beating Armagh wasn't something special more than what it meant for this year. What happened in 2002 happened. People often say that. They tell me I was a point away from lifting the cup as Kerry captain. But I was a magpie - I wasn't supposed to be captain. I was a point away in a club final as well. I'd say I'm bad luck with captaincies. Leave me away from it."
Luck! A sub-theme of prior negotiations for what was to have been a more substantial feature article was the role of luck or superstition or piseogs. Being spread over a national paper on the day before a big game was something not to be considered.
The last question is intended to elicit a more detailed explanation of the role of the piseogs. Piseog club isn't unlike Fight Club though. Darragh Ó Sé laughs, too old not to have seen this coming.
"First rule of piseogs: no talking about piseogs."
"But?"
"At all."
"At all?"
"Well the main piseog is we don't talk about piseogs."
You get up grinning and wondering aloud if an affinity for the piseogs isn't the most wonderful way for mapping ones life. Ó Sé is grinning too. Another All-Ireland looming. Another act in the traditional side of his life. You wish him luck.
"Thanks," he says, "and keep us out of the paper on the Saturday."
Done.
