Armagh's Aidan O'Rourke talks to Keith Duggan about last year's finished business, and this season's unfinished

About three weeks before last year's All-Ireland final, a tailor arrived at an Armagh training session to collect measurements. Nimble and fastidious in his attention to millimetres and hemlines, he cut an amusing and unlikely figure in the helter-skelter of a football changing-room.

"Perfect on the neck, Mr Marsden."

"Plenty of room around the shoulders, Mr McEntee."

His appearance was just another small cameo in the great charade of fantastic episodes and characters that present themselves to teams at this point in every September.

Ten minutes later, jogging in collective solemnity around the field, the Armagh players had forgotten all about it, immersing themselves in their preparation for the final against Kerry.

The days passed, the magical Sunday arrived and by five to five, Armagh had crossed the threshold, thousands of their fans moving unstoppably over the famous field like hot lava as Kieran McGeeney prepared to give a Hogan Stand speech which evoked 100 years of feeling.

Later that evening, the boys were bussed out to the Citywest feeling dreamy and terrific and found that their bags had been moved to fresh, individual rooms they were given for the night.

And awaiting each of them was a suit, tailored to specification, the grace note to a day of transcendence. The touch, the understated class behind the detail, fascinated Aidan O'Rourke that night as much as it does now.

That All-Ireland Sunday passed at the speed of light and felt like bedlam to the wing back. That someone had been assigned to such a tiny and unforgettable task as hanging the suits for the incumbent champions gave the shivers.

"It's just a small thing," he recollected last week over a cup of tea and a plain chicken sandwich in a Newry café.

"It's not rocket science or anything. But obviously Joe (Kernan) just sits down and takes himself through every minute of the match day with a pen and paper and considers every possible thing a player would need. He probably over compensates for us at times. But none of the boys would have any hesitation in saying that we feel we are the best looked after team in Ireland."

Now, on the eve of defending their championship, small revelations have filtered out over the past year about the way Armagh do things, tales that have made the public sit up and acknowledge them as something special.

The longer they persevere, the more they seem like a group with a keen and unprecedented appreciation of their place not just within the All-Ireland football championship hierarchy, but within the cosmos itself.

McGeeney's unalterably fixed vision set the tone last year, but, since that time, the leadership qualities of several other players have become abundantly clear.

Take Aidan O'Rourke.

Although the name is not sung as often as that of McConville or McDonnell or McGeeney - "those boys all have their own fan clubs" laughs the player - it is almost impossible now to imagine this Armagh team without him.

A fortnight ago, O'Rourke developed his teenage obsession with sports photographs into a business venture, opening a shop called Sporting Visions in Newry.

The player was able to use the weight that comes with being All-Ireland champions. The GAA president Seán Kelly showed up, the Armagh boys were there and Ulster luminaries like 'big Anthony" (Tohill) made appearances to examine high-quality stills of themselves at their most majestic, doing what they do best.

As a kid, O'Rourke used to subscribe to Sports Illustrated, which would not have been heavily reliant on its south Armagh readership, and collected the images as he fed his interest in all sports.

The Miami quarterback Dan Marino was a favourite and the more he read about Muhammad Ali, the more he wanted to read.

Of all the books and biographies, he reckons Thomas Hauser's is the best because "you get the good and the bad, you get to hear from guys like Freddie Pacheo who was closest to Ali because he was one of the few who told him the truth."

O'Rourke's favourite Ali photograph is the classic black and white of the champion leering over the stricken Sonny Liston in Maine, 1965.

A fight that took place 3,000 miles away and 11 years before O'Rourke was even born to a country family from Dromintee.

The link between Armagh and Ali, of course, was forged on the morning of last year's All-Ireland when a letter addressed to each of the players was slipped under the door of the hotel room. Whatever it said, it said, but it was signed in the faltering and omnipotent hand of Muhammad.

If O'Rourke played any role in the inspiration behind that missive and if he trades motivational ideas with Big Joe, he prefers not to say, quietly protesting that it is just the wrong time of year to go into stuff like that.

Armagh have been courteous and open before and after their All-Ireland triumph, but certain rituals and curiosities they regard as sacrosanct.

What he will say is that he is constantly taken with the universal quest for perfection in sport, citing Lance Armstrong (as will several other Armagh boys during the press evening) as a modern example.

"Guys likes that, they just interest you."

The O'Rourke name is gold standard around the tight cluster of villages that have always been the fountain for Armagh's footballers. Dromintee is a parish blissfully unfazed by the border in that it encompasses both north and south.

Growing up with three brothers, Aidan recalls it as a typical household; rumbustious and fun and hard working, the back door strewn with discarded football boots.

"My Da is a builder and, like most people in south Armagh, we did a bit of farming part time. Or maybe that should be most people have a trade and a farm part time and the rest is taken up by football."

Youth was the thing that distinguished the O'Rourke's when it came to football. At the age of 16, Brendan O'Rourke captained Dromintee to its first intermediate title in 1966.

In 1991, his son Cathal O'Rourke made his championship debut in the Marshes against Down. He came on a skinny and precocious wing forward marked by the gnarled DJ Kane. Down won by a point and, on Monday morning, Kane resumed his role as a schoolteacher of O'Rourke's in Newry.

A year later, Aidan was a substitute on the Armagh minor team despite having just turned 15. He played the winter league, got skinned by Louth's Ollie McDonnell and sat on the bench when they lost an All-Ireland minor final to Meath in heart-breaking circumstances - a last-minute goal that convinced many that the Orchard county was cursed.

"I met a buck last week that was on that team, Eddie Martin and funny, we got talking about that game. He was saying he still has to watch the video, but doesn't reckon he ever will."

Now, Aidan's youngest brother Michael is playing Armagh minor for the second consecutive year and the next youngest Martin is a member of the senior squad.

"I remember me Da playing for Dromintee into his 40s. Then he managed us for what was our best ever spell, when we won the intermediate championship and went to senior and he kept us there.

"But it was madness in the house. He'd be there, 'why the Jasus didn't ya pass there' and we'd be saying back, 'why the fuck didn't you make that change or try this.' It never ended."

Cathal was the anointed one, perceived along with Ger Houlahan the great hope of Armagh football during the forlorn years of the early and mid-1990s.

He inherited from his old man a true gift for striking the ball and is, reckons Aidan, still the best free-taker in Armagh along with Oisín McConville.

Cathal was there long enough to be part of last year's historic win and then hung up the boots on a rich and smooth career.

Aidan's journey has been bumpier. After the early success came four or five seasons in the twilight zone at senior level, with league optimism filtering into the numbing feeling of sitting out championship after championship.

His relationship with the joint management of Brian Canavan and Brian McAlinden was strained.

"You couldn't talk. If you questioned anything, it became a shouting match and then it was like 'sit down and shut yer mouth, we know best'."

In 1999, an Ulster championship revived Armagh football and the team prepared for an All-Ireland semi-final against Meath amidst euphoric hope throughout the rolling hills in the south of the county.

The team lost and the manner heightened the debate over the full-back spot, with Ger Reid regarded as a player under pressure. O'Rourke had been a minor and under-21 full back and might have expected to be regarded as a solution.

"Well, to be honest, yeah. People were saying that to me. But it was and is tough because Ger is a great buddy of mine. And the criticism he took back then was ridiculous.

"Like, he was having a stormer against Meath, even. Two quick yellows and that was that. But the next year, we played Meath in a challenge before the championship, it's a custom. Ger had been injured and I got in full back on (Graham) Geraghty and I did well, being truthful. Then we played Kerry in a challenge and Ger was back in full back and he would tell you himself, he struggled that day. They stuffed us.

"I was at wing back. But I was thinking that this must be my chance. Team was picked two days later and, no explanation, I was back on the bench."

If he didn't overtly doubt, then he certainly wondered. Redemption came with Joe Kernan, who gave him a run in the league and made him feel secure about it.

"Suddenly, you weren't just trying to do the safe thing, which isn't always the best thing in football. I felt at ease."

And then, the season unfolded in an epiphanic flash and O'Rourke ended the season as an All-Ireland medal winner and an All Star. Even as the victory bus was crawling towards the Carrigdale Hotel, a stone's throw from his house, he was giddy for more football.

League, McKenna Cup, anything. He didn't want it to end.

Now, 12 months on and the white tape on the Champs Elysees flutters before him once again. Everything and nothing has changed for Aidan O'Rourke.

An elderly gent approaches him in the café - Johnny Murphy, a veteran footballer who possibly diced with his health by lining out with both Armagh and Louth, and a neighbour from Dromintee. He was calling by to wish Aidan good luck with the business.

"Just havin' the craic with this man here. Are ya having tea?"

"No, I'll go on down the road."

Around Dromintee, the middle O'Rourke is a folk hero now. In Belfast, where he lives, he is just "Aidan from next door. They wouldn't have a clue what I'll be at on Sunday".

He lives in the heart of nationalist West Belfast, a graffiti artist's paradise of symbolism and imagery but nowhere has ever resonated with as much Irishness as his home. "I miss Dromintee. There's an awful honesty about country people. And it is really difficult to describe the passion for the game in Dromintee. I'll get back there some day in the not too distant future," he says mistily, like an ex-pat reminiscing in a Bowery bar, even though we are only seven miles from his home parish.

And even though south Armagh has been portrayed as a symbol for the extreme elements of the nationalist cause, that has never crossed over into the football realm. The tricolour rarely if ever mixes with the splendid orange colours of the county.

"I don't see any co-relation," says O'Rourke. "Like, a young fella kicking a ball around a field has nothing to do with politics. The thing is, everyone in south Armagh expresses themselves through Gaelic football and obviously the vast majority of people are Catholic and nationalist. So you can make that link if you want, but football is a sport.

"Like, if it was cricket everyone was playing, would that link still be made? And like, as for the flag, you wouldn't see it. Maybe at Cliftonville games when people want to make a statement that this is a nationalist soccer team. But in GAA, everyone is nationalist.

"Are you going to make the point to Tyrone people that you are a nationalist team? Or to Kerry people? It doesn't come into it - you are an Armagh man, an Irish man. That's it."

Armagh is different than last year, both the team and the county. Again the villages are washed through in orange, but there is a calmer mood now. When the Sam Maguire is sitting in your neighbour's house, it is hard to feel dispossessed.

"I read a lot last year about an oppressed people making a stand. We probably had an inferiority complex in Armagh. We probably weren't certain how people down south would have regarded us. I think now, our supporters are able to travel to games down south with their heads held high and converse with anyone about football."

His favourite Armagh photograph is of the team standing for the anthem in Croke Park before last year's final. Shoulder to shoulder, apprehensive and lost in thought.

Long ago, when he first began studying sports images he realised that, for all the tautology, no minute repeats itself. It is a constant flux.

Half an hour after last year's All-Ireland win, Armagh locked themselves in the sanctuary of the dressing room. Upstairs was still a cacophony of celebration. It wasn't long before next season was brought up.

"Don't remember who brought it up. We just agreed we were going be fuckin' well back here."

Most of them are; but not his brother Cathal for instance, or Benny Tierney. And the Armagh of tomorrow will not quite be the Armagh of next year. "It's going to be over some day," he says.

The pictures he collects are as close as he can come to making something permanent.

A US heavyweight fight that took place in a vaudeville theatre in a draughty corner of New England nearly 40 years ago still matters because of that photograph. Stare at it long enough and you can nearly feel as if you might have been there. That's the wonder of it for Aidan O'Rourke.

And long after this season is finished, he will take some archived picture of tomorrow's epic, with its unique Ulster twist, some polished image from the heat and tumult to remind him that yes, he was out there once, in the heart of it, when they were kings.