Sideline Cut: The strangest radio conversation of the week took place on Monday evening between Dave Fanning and Seán Boylan.

RTÉ's resident hipster was interviewing the former Meath manager about Tony Wilson, the undisputed king of the Manchester music scene, who died last week. Like many people who happened upon the programme by accident I was temporarily dazed.

Boylan's voice is unmistakeable and full of laughter. He could make Liam Harnan or Mick Lyons, defenders who used to make grown men cry out for their mammies in their sleep, sound as harmless as teddy bears. Which is not to say the boys were hard, but if you had to choose between confronting the Yeti or being marked by Lyons for an hour, you would have to think long and hard.

Boylan's voice is one of the most familiar of GAA sounds and so it seemed downright hallucinatory to hear him fondly reminiscing about a man who discovered Joy Division and opened Manchester's Hacienda Club and later championed the trippy Scally dance band Happy Mondays.

It turned out that Wilson's parents were firm friends with Boylan's folks and visited their home in Dunboyne so regularly that the two boys formed a brotherhood as much as a friendship.

They were light years apart in terms of sensibility. Wilson headed off to read English at Cambridge and then founded Factory Records, transforming the music scene in the north of England. Boylan stayed local, inherited the family knowledge in herbal medicine and, of course, set about creating one of the great and iconoclastic Gaelic football teams of the modern age. But the friendship survived their radically different walks of life and the two men met regularly.

It turns out while Boylan was preparing his teams for those thundering and bloody clashes with Cork in the 1987 and 1988, Wilson was a regular visitor. Before one of the finals, he landed on the door with Alan Erasmus, a black northern music head who ran the Hacienda night club and was fond of wearing flowing black clothes and gold crosses. "Tina thought he was some kind of bishop," Boylan recalled of his wife's reaction.

And when Boylan went to Manchester, he gamely went to Wilson's haunts, even though he was not remotely au fait with the cutting edge of Lancashire rock music. It took him to interesting places: one time he had just arrived in Manchester and ended up accompanying Wilson on a visit to the home of John Lennon - the first one in which the Meath man had ever seen gold taps. Boylan was with Wilson when he died from illness last week and was one of the many public figures to pay tribute to him.

The two men were as different as chalk and cheese but they shared one important trait. Wilson was an individualist who took an almost absurd pride in Manchester and set about making his city his place; he wanted to make it different from and superior to London and the culture of the south of England; he wanted to make his home great, comparable to any of the great cities of the world.

Boylan set out to do the same thing through Meath football. The tradition Meath had established in the middle part of the 20th century, winning one All-Ireland title in three consecutive decades (1949, 1954, 1957) had become irrelevant by the time Boylan took the post of manager in 1982. He was a product of the hardy, no-frills environment of Meath county hurling, a tough nut with a spiritual side. We think of the back-to-back Meath All-Irelands of 1987 and 1988 and forget about the setbacks they endured - most seriously in the 1986 All-Ireland semi-final when Joe Cassells, Lyons and Michael McQuillan collided, leaving Kerry's Ger Power free to claim the ball and score into an empty net.

Meath came back stronger and proved unrepentant champions in the bitter aftermath of those Cork matches. They displayed a similarly defiant streak when Boylan's next team beat a popular Mayo side in the 1996 All-Ireland final.

Meath played football simple and hard; they didn't bitch when they got beaten and didn't much care if people complained about them either. They knew they were never the most popular team in the country and accepted that with a shrug, although Boylan's graciousness and charm made him one of the most popular and recognisable figures on the GAA scene.

And they gave the game great players - O'Rourke, O'Connell, Hayes, Stafford, Giles, Fay, McDermott, Murphy, Geraghty, Beggy, Flynn. They played, won All-Irelands and left again.

What Boylan gave Meath was a sense of invincibility. In the 1980s and 1990s, you could beat Meath but only for a summer. You couldn't make them disappear. They were as durable as rubber. And then, suddenly, they were no more. The drubbing Galway gave them in the All-Ireland final of 2001 was remarkable because Meath teams were never beaten that way. That was the Royals' last September appearance - the last Leinster county to make it that far. Two years later, Boylan went and Meath football seemed to go quiet again.

Now they are back. Colm Coyle, a disciple of Boylan's, has had an incredible season with Meath. What he appears to have done best is instil that bloody-mindedness, that frightening will-not-be-beaten mentality into the present generation of players.

Coyle has not seemed surprised by anything his team have done this year. He has seemed amused, but not surprised.

Against Tyrone, with the madcap fans jigging on the Hill, it was like Meath had never gone away. Football matters more in the county now than ever; it is the bridge between the traditional towns and countryside and the teeming suburban estates that have transformed the county.

It is a funny thing: many Meath people work and socialise in Dublin but when they wear the replica Royals shirts and head to Croke Park, it seems like a celebration of the fact they are definitively not from Dublin.

And here is the thing about Meath: you may not like them but strong Meath football teams make the championship more interesting. They have made this championship; their matches against Dublin, Galway and Tyrone were the best of the competition. As for Graham Geraghty's goal against Tyrone, with its coolness and instinct and light insolence - that bore the fingerprints of genius.

The thought of going in against a rampantly confident Meath team will likely excite and trouble Billy Morgan. Meath teams are blissfully untroubled by the expectation of being favourites. They play the same way anyhow: intense, cheeky, lucky, hard and different from anybody else. Tony Wilson would have applauded that.

As for Seán Boylan? Don't be surprised if he turns up on stage at Slane today to sing Honky Tonk Woman with Jagger and the boys.