"The respect we'd have for each other. . . well, it's unwritten really. That's the best way I could describe it. It's just there."

- Sean Boylan on John McDermott. There they all were, just as he had imagined it. A Dublin pub on a darkening spring evening, standing alongside the very names that had thieved those idle moments of his boyhood. Here he was, supping beer and coveting every casual utterance flowing from Hayes, Harnan, O'Rourke, men who had walked the same land as he but somehow inhabited a different universe.

There he was, a Meath man, standing tall when Gerry McEntee joined the group, eyeing him warily.

"Who are you?" comes the question.

"John McDermott," he replies, chest pumped slightly.

"And where are you from?"

"Curragha," he responds.

"Is that in Meath?," inquires McEntee flatly, and the youngster feels his legs buckle. . . .

John McDermott is chuckling as he recalls the tale. "That just put me in my spot," he nods. "You know, you're going out for a drink with the likes of Colm O'Rourke and McEntee - there was I stuck in the middle thinking, Jesus, these are my heroes. But after that I said to myself, `to hell with this, it's my chance. I'll grab it and if I don't, well, at least I'll give it a good rattle'."

It is the week before the All-Ireland final and the midfielder has been working late on a black, damp night. He hooks up with his team-mates at Ballinteer House and grabs a bit of dinner. It's like the last night of the fair and everyone is jovial; mentors reminisce, players sign footballs and Meath shirts, and there is perhaps a sense of accomplishment at the fact that they are still gathering here, still eating spuds and chicken as a team so late in the year.

It is very difficult not to notice McDermott when he enters a room. Besides being perhaps the most prominent footballer in the country right now, he is so physically imposing; blue eyed and hollow cheeked and bearing a demeanour which doesn't invite back-slapping familiarity. Not that he's overtly standoffish - just distant.

As Colm O'Rourke puts it: "He never seeks the limelight, it just follows him. John is just not big into the fuss or the attention, it's not his way."

And yet he deals with it without breaking stride. Always obliging when it comes to photo calls and interviews, and never elusive on the phone, he is the polished and articulate captain of the International Rules squad who will depart for the southern hemisphere next week. He is, without his asking, a paragon of the new, progressive GAA. When he steps forward in Adelaide as Irish captain under the stadium lights and the satellites beam his image to our homes, it will be easy to feel confidence in what he represents. His very being there will be reassuring.

For even when Meath football was under censure and a hailstorm of criticism in 1996, McDermott's innate talent was acknowledged. He is one of the stars of the '90s, a footballer who forces admiration. Beyond that, we know little of him. No fond anecdotes litter his wake, no youthful legends have spilled into this decade and, unusually for one of his profile, there is no neighbourly nickname. To us, to all outsiders, he remains purely a player.

"John Mc is his own man, always was, from the first day I knew him," says Sean Boylan. "A man that took on a lot of responsibilities - maybe without realising it - very early on in life when his father died when he was about 13 years of age. He worked very hard with his mother, Lord rest her, and the family running the farm and going to school - the milking was done before school. He learned to survive on his own at a very early age."

Home was Curraha, the north Meath parish where he kicked his earliest football. In the late '80s, when the county team began winning All-Irelands, McDermott, big shouldered and mop-haired, would make his way down to Ashbourne House. There was a chippie near by and a load of them would get the feed in and gape at Beggy and Stafford, gods so close you see their breath against the headlights as they exhaled. It was around the time that the rivalry with Cork sprung up, a gritty, bruising time for Gaelic football.

"I think the rivalry thing wasn't something for the players, really. Okay, supporters would talk about it, but you wouldn't find yourself waking up screaming in the middle of the night thinking of Cork men," says McDermott.

"For us, it didn't really matter. Because I remember being at a semi-final in 1985 and Kerry absolutely hammering us. I was in the middle of the Hogan Stand and I saw Meath supporters leaving. I was thinking, you should never leave a match, even if your team is down by 50 points. You should be there on good days and bad. But they were traipsing out and I was thinking, please, no one leave. I think that, above all, was my abiding memory of the '80s."

He always had it in the back of his mind that he'd like a crack at the Meath seniors. No small ambition for a raw teenager from a junior club. Seaan Boylan remembers asking Mattie Kerrigan to withdraw him from an under-21 game so they could use him with the seniors in a league game the following day. McDermott was substituted, oblivious to the reason. Boylan still shines at the memory of observing his reaction from the stands.

"And John trots off, head shaking, peels off the gloves, and he says, `ah Jaysus, I wasn't going that bad'."

By early 1991, he was hovering on the fringes of the senior team. Boylan blooded him in the midst of the Dublin-Meath epic in 1991.

No angel either - he took flak during the 1996 postscript and won't loiter in the shadows if things get heated. A player anyone would want on their team.

"I was just in the game and caught the best ball . . . ever seen in Croke Park," recounts McDermott with a grin. "Turned and gave it to (Dublin's) Ciaran Duff and he stuck it over the bar. I was called ashore again, good luck. It was total devastation - I was thinking, `Jesus, you've messed up here big time'. I'll never forget it."

Time and retrospect makes the tale seem funny, but it highlights the fact that back then McDermott's future seemed far from predestined.

"That would be fair to say," agrees Colm O'Rourke, who knew the McDermott family when John was a kid. "He was raw enough. But he was always watching, learning, eager, mad to learn. He came good relatively late in life, when his football skills caught up with his athleticism. Now I don't think there is a footballer like him, but, yes, it would have been hard to predict that when he was a youngster."

IN 1993, McDermott transferred to Skryne and, coincidentally or not, his ascent has been virtually seamless. An All Star in 1996 and 1998, he is for many the midfielder of this decade (He will also feature on the All Star selection this year).

Earlier this summer, his personal life and sporting career sadly crossed over when his mother passed away in the days prior to the Leinster final. At the time, Boylan commented that few would ever know what it took out of him to play that day.

"That's right," he reflects. "John's mother loved to be at all his matches, be it with the club or Meath. And the thing is, she'd be in the crowd and people might criticise him and she'd be there, `ah yeah, you're right, he's not going right'. And they'd never know who she was. But she was immensely proud of him and it was a big break in the family. They were like pals really."

But he got through it, did enough and the world did not so much as blink as Meath came through Leinster. And so tomorrow, we will see John McDermott at the summit of his game. All we can say of him is that he is of Meath. Oozing football and steeled with that unflinching sense of purpose that comes natural to them.

No angel either - he took flak during the 1996 postscript and won't loiter in the shadows if things get heated. A player anyone would want on their team.

When it came to choosing a captain for the International Rules, Mickey Moran and John O'Keeffe were adamant it should be McDermott. O'Rourke, as coach, was half embarrassed at picking a Skyrne club man.

"But the reasons are obvious," he says now. "Even at this level, you can see that he is someone other players respect."

Respect he commands by the lorry load. But there is another side to John McDermott also, an aspect reserved for those who know. Us outsiders, however, we must content ourselves with gazing from afar and saying that at least we know him as a footballer. And maybe it's enough.

Perhaps the rest is best left unwritten.