AT LAST. To the devoted Gaelic games follower, the reported signs of life on Mars are not more remarkable than the life Mayor proved exists in Connacht football. In fact Sunday's semi final demonstrated belatedly that there's also life in this year's football championship.

This is good new for Croke Park and the Bank of Ireland who must have experienced moments, of quiet dismay at the lack lustre quality of the Gaelic football season they have been sponsoring. Now there has been a major breakthrough of the type that has so revolutionised hurling in the last, two years. (Although peculiarly, just as in the Bank's inaugural sponsorship year in 1994, the party has been slightly gatecrashed by the Ulster Bank who sponsored Down when they won the All Ireland two years ago and who employ two of the Mayo team).

The 1990s are turning out to be a remarkable decade for football and hurling. It started eventfully with Cork recording the first All Ireland double in a century and went on to include the reemergence of Ulster football, two first time football champions in successive years and Leitrim's breakthrough, Clare's renaissance in hurling and their historic football achievement in Munster.

Now that a Connacht county has presented its credentials with a certain amount of style, the picture is complete. It's not necessary for Mayo to win the All Ireland next month to sustain the point: the fact of their win at the week.end and Galway's creditable showing last year indicates that there isn't quite the gap between Connacht and the rest that has been taken as a working assumption in football in recent years.

What reasons lie behind all this novelty? A levelling of standards is one familiar response. But this is a bit obvious. There has been a decline at the very top in football in that the great Kerry team had to retire at some stage, but that's not a full explanation either.

One item of historical symmetry is relevant. Mayo's defeat of Kerry on Sunday was five years to the day since Down's defeat of Kerry in the 1991 All Ireland semi final. That event can now be seen as the first crack in tradition's edifice. Up to that time, Munster and Leinster operated a duopoly that had seen them split up the previous 23 All Irelands during which time their respective champions had lost only once in an Ulster or Connacht team (Galway's defeat of Offaly in 1973).

When Down broke that stranglehold, there was a damburst. Not alone did they go on to win that year's All Ireland but Ulster champions were to go through four years undefeated.

That statistic has prompted the theory that Down's example inspired other Ulster counties.

This is undoubtedly true but there were also more tangible factors at work. The fact that Ulster champions had become competitive, was one of two radical impacts on the championship this decade. The other was the introduction of the open draw in Munster and Leinster.

Prior to 1991 it had been possible for the champions of those provinces to gradate their seasons. In both cases, there were only two serious contenders for the title and no call for either to play in the first round. Instead there were one (Munster) or two (Leinster) matches to warm up the provincial finalists. A major test against the other county followed.

Two years out of three, there was time for the winners to come down and dispense with the Ulster or Connacht team before building up to the final. In the third year, when Munster and Leinster had to play each other, the counties simply went for it without reservation confident that they could win the All Ireland final against the winners of the other semi final, having peaked a month earlier.

THE open draw scuppered that. In 1991, Dublin and Meath ended up having to play in a preliminary round in early June. Cork faced Kerry in the Munster semi final a couple of weeks later. The whole rhythm of supremacy was disrupted. The winning teams, Meath and Kerry, found themselves in terrible trouble in their subsequent matches, against Wicklow and Limerick respectively.

Then to add to the difficulties, Ulster teams stopped rolling over in All Ireland semi finals. Entire systems of preparation were now redundant. Fitness and sharpness couldn't be developed in matches of neatly ascending standards. A team might have to try and peak three times over the summer.

Not unnaturally, the teams most used to this relentless competitiveness - Ulster counties accustomed to even standards and an open draw for a number of years - began to thrive.

None of the foregoing explains why Connacht got cut adrift when Ulster made a break to join the leaders. Theories abounded in recent years: lack of confidence, that the lack of pace and fitness in the province ill prepared its standard bearers far All Ireland combat. In fact, the whole state of depression may have been exaggerated.

While the two less successful provinces were keeping each other company in the basement, it was in fact Connacht that had the better of their triennial semi finals. In the 20 years before Down's liberation, the western champions beat their Ulster counterparts five times out of seven.

It's only in the last five years that Connacht have appeared so far off the pace and, ironically that has been more to do with Mayo's internal problems than any more widespread malaise: the irony being that for much of the last 10 years, Mayo had been the western county most credibly threatening a breakthrough.

Even within those five years, Roscommon in 91 and Galway last year have lost All Ireland semi finals narrowly. In one of Mayo's "off" years, 1992, they were only beaten by three points by eventual champions Donegal, but in a match of such stultifying ineptitude that losing it represented a hammer blow to morale.

It was Mayo's 20 point defeat by Cork in 1993 that marked the nadir of Connacht's fortunes. Leitrim's wholesome but naive effort the following year was an improvement that was followed by Galway and now Mayo.

What is demonstrated more than anything by the events of the weekend is that a good manager can adjust the environment in which his team operates. John Maughan had already done that in Clare, but in his own country, the resources were richer. Martin Carney's under 21 sides had developed their own self esteem. There was never going to be a problem getting them to follow an ambitious blueprint.

Outgoing Galway manager Bosco McDermott, a soft-spoken veteran of his county's three in a row 30 years ago, was always perplexed by the - to him - unfamiliar notion that Connacht football wad inferior. Maybe he succeeded in generating more self regard than self respect in Galway's footballers but his faith has been vindicated in a roundabout way.