The first time Mark O'Connor set foot in Gaelic Park, he was 17. They got word he was busy fending off frostbite on the sites around South Boston and came calling. "Just for a weekend," they said. "Come and see New York."

They were to fly him to La Guardia Airport, a short car ride to Gaelic Park. The kid landed in JFK. The kid ended up in Times Square. Bantry was never like this. He began a desperate round of bartering with the lazy-eyed drivers in yellow cabs, most of whom just gazed vacantly back at him when he asked how much to Gaelic Park.

Eventually, someone ferried him across town in return for his last 16 bucks. He sprinted the last few hundred yards through suburban grey and remembers a silver, graffitied subway train rattling across the GAA's most famous foreign field.

"Ten dollars to get you in, pal," offered a confrontational security guard just when the kid was beginning to feel triumphant. "Look, you gotta let me in. If I don't play, I don't get any money to get back to Boston," he said, half shouting, half pleading. He waltzed into the dressing-room with entire seconds left before the throw-in. Tonight, when he runs out on the same arid turf as part of the Defence Forces unit to play the New York side, he may permit himself a brief smile at the memory. He has, after all, seen a fair few banner days since then. "God, that was, what, 13 years ago," O'Connor recalled earlier this week. The American thing was different then.

He had skated along on naive curiosity, and joined the young Irish crowding the neighbourhoods of Boston and the boroughs around New York out of necessity. That winter of 1986 was relentlessly hard, especially for a youngster who had spent the previous five sitting in a classroom scribbling notes on Kavanagh and the workings of the Stock Exchange. He came home after six months, older and more than a little wiser.

As O'Connor started to mull over the future, a family friend suggested an Army life, and he applied with a shrug. They took him on and he found himself studying Arts in UCG, winning a Sigerson medal in 1992 and claiming a full-back spot with the Cork seniors, all the time whizzing up and down to Bantry for team training.

"It wasn't a way of life I'd ever really considered, but I suppose it suited me," he says. "It afforded me the chance to do certain things - for instance, going to Galway, travelling abroad. It is unquestionably a very clearly defined style of life. You are generally very aware that you're representing the force, particularly on a trip like this, which is being treated as something very specific," he says.

Although there is an air of uncertainty over how this inaugural series will pan out - it is to be played home and away on an annual basis - both parties are approaching it with steely-eyed seriousness.

"From our point of view, this is an opportunity which was essentially made available to us by Lt Gen Dave Stapleton (Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces) and the boys here really busted a gut to make the team. We want to win these games, and the bottom line is we will go out tonight and play like it is the championship," he insists.

The New York squad, for their part, see the two-game series as invaluable preparation for their visit to Castlebar on May 29th, when they'll get to taste real championship grit, playing Mayo. The New York GAA president, Monty Moloney, has already said this series ought to offer them a true measure of their standing.

"They need these games," O'Connor says, "they will hope to learn a lot from them, and I believe that if these matches prove worthwhile and if New York can get it going a bit in Mayo, then this series could blossom into something really meaningful.

"Then we could see the local New York GAA scene really develop, with an emphasis on coaxing and coaching local youngsters on the game." The former Cork captain is hoping that the series will give him slightly more leverage as he fights to figure on the intercounty scene again. Injuries have cost him, and, while he runs with Larry Tompkins' panel regularly, lack of matches has meant he has accrued negligible playing minutes and there is a squeeze for defensive places. Tough for an athlete in his prime with a kaleidoscope of sunny days already behind him. Not that he's one to sit on a high stool sipping for comfort.

"God, I just want to get games, that's why I'm looking forward to tonight," he says. "We have beautiful weather, two fit teams, it should be a tough old game. Gaelic Park is a tight ground, there's not much room for hiding."

This time, he'll get a coach ride to the ground.