Munster SFC Semi-final/Kerry v Limerick: Nobody can quite pinpoint when Limerick football turned the corner out of the ghetto and into mainstream respectability but if the current side fail to graduate to their full potential there'll be no difficulty knowing who to bless and who to blame when the story gets written. The fingerprints of Kerrymen are all over the case.

Football in Limerick is a minority persuasion which has somehow transcended its own limitations through ambition and through passionate coveting of their neighbours' prowess. John O'Keeffe and Ger Power took stints acting as Messiah in Residence to their neighbours, O'Keeffe in particular providing a glimpse of what was possible.

Liam Kearns, currently the nation's longest-serving football manager barring Methuselah himself above in Meath, brought another touch of the franchise magic when he arrived in six years ago.

And since then no team has done as much to obscure Limerick's view of the blue sky as Kerry. The last four years have been a long tease for Limerick, a little glimpse here, a stolen peek there. Always at the end the slapdown.

Now as Kearns's team mature into their best years they find themselves cheek by jowl with a Kerry side whose pre-eminence within the game is frightening. The missionaries giveth and the missionaries taketh away.

It should be said that Limerick football people have had the wisdom to help themselves in the last decade and their prudent harvesting of the Munster championship-winning under-21 team of half a decade ago must make the local hurling community wince as they survey their own mountain of wasted talent.

The relationship between the two sports is instructive to the outsider. Football in Limerick manages its affairs coolly and quietly. There are no crisis meetings or nights of long knives. From the infamous night when Limerick's footballers were handed a cup of tea after a wet night of training and left standing and sipping the tea as the county hurlers sat down to dinner in the same hall, after training on an all-weather surface, football has earned its emancipation.

Back in 1996 - when the county was diverted, as most counties periodically are, by a furious battle for the county chairmanship (there are lessons for the Dublin hurling community here, surely) - the football brethren slipped through a motion establishing a football board for the county. There was dismay among conservatives when they realised what had been wrought but two years later the football board came into being and the game within the county began to operate on a level of parity with hurling.

Other things. A five-year plan for the game in the county was rigorously applied. The institution of a successful under-16 tournament to serve as a finger in the leaking dam of juvenile talent brought success.

Good minor teams made it through to the Munster finals of 1997 and 1998. And a year after the arrival of Kearns, Limerick went all the way to the All-Ireland under-21 final.

That game in Mullingar might have been the foundation for Tyrone's All-Ireland senior win three years later but for Limerick it was an invaluable experience even if they lost by eight points.

Ten of that Limerick team played with the senior panel that year and 13 of them were eligible for the grade again the following year. Six of them played senior football before they had even played under-21. They have been the core of the current renaissance.

That passage to the All-Ireland final was significant in more than one respect, however. Limerick escaped Munster without playing Kerry. In the years since, they have pulled away from Declan Browne's Tipperary, have left Waterford in the dust and have conquered their fear of Cork. Kerry remain the Everest and tomorrow Everest stands between Limerick and a third successive provincial final.

Much has changed in the past decade. It's not exactly a populist movement but Limerick football is more confident of its standing, within its own county boundary as well as in the outside world.

There are no more rainswept nights of training for half a dozen diehards in Pallaskenry. Limerick have survived dual-player fatwahs and big-day disappointments with their spirit intact and their faces still looking expectantly upward.

These days the footballers train at the county board facility in Rathkeale, eat square meals just like the hurlers, tan their legs in the early winter and receive the attention and finance due any serious team. It's 109 years and no Munster title though. Apartheid has ended. Liberation is still a game away. A game against Kerry. Of course.