Sideline Cut: Outside a Dublin pub on Sunday evening last, a tipsy Aughnacloy man took great delight in announcing to a Kerry friend of mine: "Youse are playing like us now. Youse are playing like us."

The perceptible change in the Kerry football philosophy that followed the appalling vista of 2003 was probably the single greatest compliment ever paid to Ulster football by the mansion owners from "Down South".

The sight of the finest manifestations of Gaeltacht manhood getting tossed around the hallowed turf by cheeky wee urchins from "Up There" was simply too disturbing for many traditionalists to take. That fascinating and seminal day was immortalised in Pat Spillane's daft if undeniably catchy phrase "puke football".

Media Pat spat those words in a fit of annoyance and pique but you don't have to be Freud to work out how they hit close to the bone and were less of a slur on the Tyrone style of play than a revelation of how he felt. Footballer Pat - a superstar with superb strength and an altar-boy haircut, a slight twist or kink to his pegs and wondrous kicking ability - felt sick to the core.

He was sick because what Tyrone did that day was like a slap in the face to the Kerry football legacy and also because they came along 20 years too late.

Footballer Pat would have loved a crack at Tyrone and deep down he would have recognised something of his own splintered team in their extreme fitness, their speed and imagination and their deep-down arrogance. Footballer Pat knew special when he saw it but Media Pat was loath to recognise it on the day.

He did so on television last Sunday night, to audible cheers from the Tyrone banquet hall where the Sam Maguire sat. I lost count of the number of Tyrone people who expressed delight in the fact that this second All-Ireland championship would surely make Spillane eat his words.

It seemed astonishing so many people would care so deeply about what a lippy pundit who, by his own admission is not universally loved in his own county, had to say about the Tyrone style.

It stems, of course, from many decades of an inferiority complex and the Ulster sensation, justified or not, of being guests at a party where everyone wore nicer clothes and had more interesting things to say. For years, it was accepted that once in Croke Park, Ulster teams would shut up and behave and leave the serious business of winning the All-Ireland football championship to one of the entitled counties from the South.

Ulster turned inward and concentrated on the rigours of provincial glory, acting out an annual summer pageant play that spectators from below the Cavan-Monaghan equator regarded as an oddity, sometimes colourful, sometimes barbaric.

Once the surviving county presented itself down south, a Dublin, a Kerry, a Galway or a Meath was only too happy to clarify the finer points of football etiquette and winning. Afterwards, the Ulster boys were more than welcome to tea and sandwiches and then they could feck off back up to the bombs.

Outside the notable exceptions - Down in the 1960s - and the memorable exploitation of the fault line by Donegal, Derry and Down in the 1990s - that has been the story. And it has deepened whatever natural elements of cultural and popular and anecdotal separation make Up There different from Down South.

That is not to suggest southern GAA people have not given untold hours of help and friendship to the games in Ulster or there is a general antipathy toward the Republic in Ulster.

Of course there are friendships and of course there are instances of goodwill. But broadly speaking, there is also a spiky and tense element to the relationship.

After the best All-Ireland football championship in years, the best anybody can say now is nobody is fully sure how extensively Armagh and Tyrone (with Derry, perhaps Down and Donegal waiting in the wings) could yet alter the landscape. The fact is that Kerry, the paragons of football, tried valiantly and smartly to out-duel the best of Ulster at their own game - and failed.

That, of course, has worrying implications for the Kingdom. They have a driven and enlightened manager in Jack O'Connor and a dedicated squad boasting several all-time great Kerry footballers, and yet they were hanging on by their fingernails on September Sunday. That fact is as shocking for the rest of the South's football counties as it is for Kerry.

Because for southern football counties, life is different from what it is up North.

In the last 15 years, the Republic has become rich, selfish, fast, bloated and complacent.

It has forced its teachers to conclude that the smartest thing they can do is teach and go home. It has demoralised all men of the cloth. The people who made the GAA what it is in this country are disappearing and their replacements are few and far between. Soon, very soon, the GAA will be in trouble in the Republic unless there is a pause for thought.

In the meantime, the North has managed to evolve into a perfect breeding ground for the GAA ethos. It is a perfect reflection of what has been lost in the South. They have relative peace now but not so much that it dissolves the Nationalist ethos. They have some wealth but nothing as obscene or ostentatious as down South. They have the convenient imposition of the British colleges and sporting-grants system. And they have time on their hands and common courtesy to burn and pride in their locality.

That was never so evident as at the Tyrone press and public night in Carrickmore. Even through the darkness, the place shone and it was the attitude as much as the organisation that made many of us realise they were operating at a different level.

Maybe it was a coincidence, but to see Mickey Harte, son of Errigal Ciarán, sitting in the splendid clubhouse in Carrickmore was fitting. It only seems like yesterday that those two clubs staged pitch, mid-winter battles that made viewers down South tut-tut and raise their eyes to heaven at the primitive ways of Up North. Not any more.

Some people did and some people didn't see Peter Canavan take a firm grip of "the Gooch" (Colm Cooper) at the conclusion of last Sunday's final.

The Kerryman had played a ball forward and was, like his team-mates, desperate to aid a last-gasp attack. Canavan grabbed the heir apparent as though his life depended on it and Cooper, understandably enraged, launched an incensed attack at the Tyrone legend. As the whistle went seconds later and Canavan announced his retirement that night, it turned out to be his grace note in Croke Park.

After his lordly goal and that unforgettable second-half point, it seemed a poor note on which to bow out. But then, Canavan never claimed to be an angel. He always had the bit of "street" in him. And that final act, committed in the maelstrom of a thunderous afternoon, was a statement. Fair or unfair, there was no way past Tyrone at that moment.

They are no longer inhibited or fearful or deferential and no longer care what Down South thinks.

They don't have to.

The ball game has changed. Up There makes the rules. And the fun is only beginning.