Dazzling days of white sunlight in Kildare. The team which betrayed so many high hopes so often this decade finish their training session and the grey stand in Conleth's Park bursts into a flame of applause. Players make their way through the fenced compound to the changing rooms and lilliputian children swarm about the lilywhite Gullivers.

If Kildare people have a difficulty with refugees they don't show it. Brian Lacey, Brian Murphy and Karl O'Dwyer are signing shirts and patting heads as busily as anyone in the throng. Mick O'Dwyer is spinning about the place smiling on all who smile. Kildare football matters again.

And O'Dwyer? It has been so long since the last Kerry dynasty crumbled into the sea that the strangeness of Mick O'Dwyer's presence here in Kildare is scarcely detectable anymore. The missionary zeal which has distinguished his two spells in charge here dissipated a lot of the grumbling about mercenary zeal. And now that he has delivered the dreamtime, all but the faithful are hushed to silence.

He moves about with the dynamism and restlessness which seem to be the core of his nature. You can detect the random infectiousness of his energy everywhere. The training session, the lightest of kickabouts, ends with the team gathered around O'Dwyer in a reverential circle near one goalmouth. Waves of loud laughter issue from the huddle every now and then. O'Dwyer beckons the dietician into the company. All good nature and happy vibes. Not a furrowed brow anywhere.

The team skips into the dressingrooms with applause still smacking their ears, but O'Dwyer remains out in the fresh air tending to a hundred tasks, still effervescent as his players head off to a barbecue in Hawksfield. Last to leave but one is Karl O'Dwyer, broad shoulders propping a face which is an offcut of his father's.

What more precisely distinguishes the son from the father is the leisure in his gait. Karl O'Dwyer isn't popping with intensity.

And yet. Some things are hereditary. Karl O'Dwyer's phone number is covered by the Official Secrets Act. His movements outside training are the subject of flurries of journalistic rumour. Nab him at training and he slips through your fingers like mercury; like his grey-mopped father.

"Any chance of a few minutes of your time for an interview, Karl?"

"Well, to be honest with you, no. There isn't."

"Even on the phone tomorrow?"

"Ara, no. I've done no interviews this year and it's worked well for me. I'd just like to keep it like that. Thanks all the same."

And it's hard to blame him. Karl O'Dwyer's is a different story to his father's. More difficult. Karl has options, one suspects. He doesn't have to be doing this. You look at Mick and think that if he was far from the clatter of studs and the smell of embrocation and the world of football that he would atrophy and die.

Karl O'Dwyer doesn't appear to be a slave to the game in the same way. In Kerry they noticed that early on. Micko's sons had mixed luck with the football. John trains South Kerry at the moment. Robbie (Karl's twin) is a perceptive centre back who has suffered unduly with injuries, Karl had a blossoming on the county team and a public and painful withering too. Michael never bothered much with the game.

They didn't amass too many medals but the game absorbed them. In UCC they used chuckle that the O'Dwyer boys came for football first and for study a distant second. Johnno spent more than half a decade there and came back later as a Sigerson trainer.

Ironically, UCC won the Sigerson the year after Johno graduated, and when Karl left in 1993 UCC came back and won it again, in 1994.

The jokes about the boys' heritage and UCC never winning anything with O'Dwyers in their team rained down on them every time they set foot in a dressingroom.

Des Cullinane of UCC remembers the O'Dwyers as well suited to the banter.

"They'd grown up with it, I suppose, but they were well able for it. They're good characters. Karl: it's always been said about him that he lacked drive and he'd be an easygoing sort of fella alright but if you get him interested he's as good as any player. He can use both feet and he's very accurate and he's a good passer of the ball with his feet. That's something Kildare haven't had. Karl is a confidence type of player. If it goes well for him early on, he'll do well."

In that respect the young O'Dwyer has been unfortunate. Playing for Kerry he was replaced by Ambrose O'Donovan in the 1992 Munster final against Clare. Kerry certainly needed some auxiliary forces at midfield, but O'Dwyer was having an especially torrid time at the hands of Seamus Clancy. He wintered well, though, enjoying a productive league campaign and it was thought the following summer that the return of Eoin Liston as full forward would suit him a little better. The previous season he had fed off a different species of Kerry legend, Jack O'Shea. Liston returned. Karl O'Dwyer began the 1993 game against Cork by kicking a wide and his confidence seeped after that.

From then on he was something of a bit player in Kerry, winding up watching games from the bench and eventually from the stands. A difficult process for a lad with such a luminous surname.

And this Sunday, his intercounty career having taken the most unlikely of twists, he faces one of those uniquely difficult situations for a footballer. Not merely a Kerryman facing his own county, but the son of the greatest Kerryman, discarded (though not lightly) by his own county, working at the business end of a Kildare team looking for a bit of history. What could he say to interviewers even if he wanted to. The stakes are high for him.

"Karl is like the father," says one Kerryman, "hard to get under him. Tough to get the lid off at the best of times." In his few years in the green and gold of Kerry he almost forged a link with his father's glorious past. For a while under the Ogie Moran dispensation when he grazed in the fullforward line under the shadow of Bomber Liston they thought he might make it. Then he slipped away, only to resurface as part of his father's second coming in Kildare. He acquired a teaching job in Rathangan, having returned to UCC for football and a H Dip in 1996.

Within Kildare there was some predictable grumbling about the manager's son being introduced into the delicate eco-system of Kildare football. Those who spoke with him in the time before his National League debut during the winter found him distinctly nervous about the prospect of playing with Kildare. The welcome he'd get and the price of failure if he didn't make it were weighty considerations. "He put a lot on the line," says Sean Donoghue, chairman of the Rathangan club. "They brought him in the league in the winter and it was a hard time, the Clane lads were to have been involved but there was that accident on their holiday in Tenerife and they pulled out. I don't think Karl was fully fit, so there was probably a few people giving out about him in Newbridge that day. He hadn't played for us by then. He'd only transferred the week before, but he was working away teaching technical graphics above in the school."

In Rathangan they have a different version to that which persists in Kerry.

"I wouldn't agree with his father," laughs Sean Donoghue "I'd have him playing midfield. That's where he plays for us and he covers every blade of grass on the pitch in 60 minutes."

There is dispute in Kildare as to which came first - the teaching job in Rathangan or the idea to play for Kildare. In Rathangan there is a connection with Waterville and the O'Dwyer family, however.

"Conlon's garage here in the town would be the connection," explains Sean Donoghue "they are a big Peugeot dealer, but their mother was from Waterville and a relation of the O'Dwyers. We wouldn't be that brilliant as a club, but we have a reasonable enough bunch of young lads. Karl came and he fitted in well. The first we heard of him was when the school told us he was coming. We got in touch with him and he agreed to play for us. To be fair to him he thought badly about leaving Waterville. He's well liked down there. They think a lot of him."

Leave he did, though. Settling in Kildare town, teaching in Rathangan (he is moving to Leixlip to teach next month, but will continue to play for Rathangan.)

By common consent he'd endured a few disastrous years with Waterville before his current revival. The confidence shot at inter-county level, his best performances came with his return to the colleges scene. He started at midfield for the UCC team that were beaten in the county final in Cork a couple of years ago and got another crack at the intensity of Sigerson life.

There is a place for Karl O'Dwyer in the team his father has built because Kildare are so astonishingly athletic and have needed a polished kicker for some time. O'Dwyer is as good a player as there is in the country to kick a score, but in another team there would be no place for him, He wins little enough 50-50 ball, but in Kildare players come through, meet a dead end and O'Dwyer takes it from them and pops it over. In Kerry every forward is scrapping for his own ball. Kildare pour through the middle and O'Dwyer hangs around and waits for his moment.

He faces many old comrades tomorrow. When he played that county final for UCC a couple of years ago the team's other big star was John Crowley, his opposite number tomorrow. His time with the college would have overlapped with Maurice Fitzgerald and Seamus Moynihan, too, and he would have had a couple of years of being trained by Paidi O Se.

There is a feeling about in some quarters that if Karl O'Dwyer scores a few heartbreaking points tomorrow the egg will be all over O Se's face. That is to misunderstand the situation and few in Kerry will begrudge Karl O'Dwyer his success or blame O Se that it is being enjoyed in a white jersey. The football constituency is too educated for that.

O'Dwyer isn't a ball winner, he is a feeder and a finisher. He thrives in Kildare's set-up because Kildare have half a dozen swashbucklers who will drive with the ball, splintering the most orderly of defences. O'Dwyer drifts and feeds, shoots or passes. He has found a team which suits him perfectly. Nobody would have said that of the current Kerry set up.

The game at hand is a case in point. Tomorrow when the anthem is done and Karl O'Dwyer takes his post on the edge of the square he will shake hands with Barry O'Shea, and the little current therein will remind him of the uniqueness of his situation. O'Shea's father, Paidi would have some proprietary rights on Kerry legend also. He won county championships in Cork and Kerry and played often in the company of Mick O'Dwyer.

Those who watched him in his time with Tralee RTC think that Barry O'Shea might ordinarily be suited to marking a full forward who floats, but leaving the corner backs exposed is something which Kerry can't afford tomorrow.

Barry inherited some of the mean streak which makes good defenders great, but tomorrow might be a frustrating day for him. He can tie Karl O'Dwyer up for 70 minutes, beating him with pace, drive and enthusiasm, and discover that O'Dwyer has two or three points in brackets after his name anyway. Drifting is art too.