Kevin Heffernan must have known that Kerry would be waiting in 1975, he must have feared that somewhere in the cosmos a bitter practical joke was being concocted whereby all the molecules necessary to create the best football team ever were being brought together in response to Heffernan's creation of the best Dublin team ever.

Kerry would be there, because Kerry were always there, standing sentinel at the gatepost asking to see if you measured up. Kerry were what defined worthy champions. If you beat them, you were worthy. End of argument.

In 1955, when Heffernan was full forward on an innovative bunch of flyers who stuck five goals past Meath in the Leinster final, out came a big lumpy Kerry team in the All-Ireland final. They dumped Dublin onto the seat of their pants.

In 1958, Derry blithely knocked the kingdom out in the semi-final. Dublin had to beat what they were offered and they had six points to spare over Derry. They went home wondering whether beating the team that beat Kerry might not make them better than Kerry?

The next year gave them their answer. A semi-final in Croker; Kerry by two points. And on it went. 1962 and another semi-final; Kerry by eight this time.1965 trundled around. Kerry, eternally sprightly, won by eight points again.

Then came 1975. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Through a friend of a friend of a friend of a culchie, my father got two tickets for the lower deck of the Cusack Stand. This was a bad omen for me. From 1972 we had watched games from Hill 16, a habit which had put us in the right spot when it transpired two years later that Dublin had a team.

The 1975 final had a greasy afternoon and dishwater skies for itself, and I forgot my worries on the walk to Croke Park. Dublin had re-invented football in 1974 and my memories of Kerry from their 1972 loss was that they played pure bog football. They drank porter; our chaps had martini's with an olive. Of course, Kerry scored an early goal which reminded them of their bloodlines. They were born for being in this place. They were effervescent, fizzing. No one had ever seen anything like it.

I remember Mickey Ned O'Sullivan, perhaps the most philosophical football man I've met, being clattered around between the shoulders of about four Dublin defenders. I was delighted with his sudden eminence. In my defence, should I be barred from Mickey Ned's tea shop, I was 12 at the time and knew no better than to wave my sky blue and white nylon flag in celebration at the ref's decision to attribute Mickey Ned's demise to misadventure. Yippee!

Soon clouds of threatened violence were gathering over the heads of my father and myself. Big, beet-coloured faces looming on my shoulder telling me I should be ashamed of the colours. I was sure there would be a fight, one of those scatters which take place in the stands from time to time and get everyone up out of their seats until somebody gets their collar felt by the long arm of the maor.

It was another devastating defeat. You look back at the 1970s and think that if Kerry hadn't emerged as the only team capable of beating Dublin from 1974 to 1979, Dublin would perhaps have won six All-Irelands before time caught up. Instead they got three plus three defeats to Kerry, the final two losses being the equivalent of being manhandled out of the history books.

You know the rest of the story. People say the 1977 game doesn't stand up as a classic on television, but you had to be there, you had to feel the breath sucked right out of the old stadium in those crazy last minutes, you had to know the context of the time, to feel it unfolding. If 1975 was an ambush, 1976 had the feel of Dublin sucker-punching Kerry. In 1977, everyone was standing on their feet braced and ready. I've never seen better or known a more thrilling day of sport.

There we have it. The boys of those summers are grey-haired men now, and I've often wondered why no one has written the definitive book on that magic era; the closest we have is David Walsh's classic Magill essay from 1989, "Goodbye to the Hill".

Maybe today it all seems like mere football, but I'll argue long and hard with anyone that Dublin and Kerry in the seventies was crucial to the history of those grey, self-hating times in Ireland. If Heffernan hadn't saved Dublin football the GAA would be dead in this city and probably demised anywhere else too by now, and we'd be a 1,000 miles closer to being the bland centre of middle Europe, another generic little country with no cultural flavour of its own.

Instead we keep alive the prospect of having real but accessible heroes from places like Marino, Finglas and Tallaght, and we have a monumental stadium growing on the same old site that my grandfather and yours ran cinder track races on a century ago.

Dublin, Kerry, their rivalry, they gave Gaelic football a glamour that almost nothing made in Ireland had at that time. It was an era when you couldn't imagine Riverdance let alone the fine creative energy of TG4. In a time of chronic national inferiority complex, this alone wasn't musty or threadbare or somehow embarrassing.

Nothing next Saturday will live up to the tradition of those times. Kerry have maybe three players who would have made it onto O'Dwyer's team. Dublin, in honesty, have none, except maybe Paul Curran in his prime. But they'll both have that impossible pride and the strange sense of history.

What those teams were keenly informs what next Saturday's teams feel about themselves. It's strange to think that so many of them not only don't remember the seventies but don't remember the day in the park in 1983. That's how it should be though. Football needs novel adventures, not recycled memories.

So, enough sentiment. Saturday is a blank sheet. Go colour it boys.