The end. People may envy the life of a GAA reporter at this time of the year: the way we get up close to the quickening pulse of the contestants, free access to the best seats in the house and a feeling of release at the end of September that feels like the completion of end-of-term exams.

There is, however, a distance which comes between a reporter and the event. Anyone who has attended a few All-Ireland finals knows the sensation of involvement, being up for one team or another, the black-and-white responses of joy and despair and most points in between.

Reporters miss out on this type of involvement. Knowledge of the extraordinary efforts of All-Ireland finalists, their commitment and levels of emotional investment, makes it impossible not to feel twinges of sadness for them when it all goes wrong on the day.

Think of those Mayo players in tears on Sunday and all they have endured over two years. Most of us will never know the obsessive focus that drives these teams of amateur sportsmen.

At a post-All-Ireland lunch, a defeated manager once said: "You really don't know what it's like, do you?". His tone was regretful rather than aggressive - and he was right. For reporters, ecstatic joy and bottomless despair are just sides of the All-Ireland coin. Winners exult, losers grieve and reporters take their holidays. We'll be back next year, spinning the same coin with different - or maybe the same - teams, another year, another coin.

Even when your own county wins big, there's not the same buzz.

Reporters generally hand in their capacity for elation at the press gate. It may sound a bit joyless, but there we are. So here's a miserable hoor's guide to Kerry's All-Ireland.

1) There was a feeling of being incorporated into history when watching Kerry celebrate the end of their 11-year famine: 31 titles and counting, given the great under-age work in the county during the recent past.

Wise old owls around Dublin were observing last week that they'd seen plenty of unheralded Kerry teams arrive in town for All-Irelands and make their way back down south with the Sam Maguire in the boot. This has been a recurrent phenomenon in football history, but not one familiar to my generation who associate Kerry with the greatest team we are ever likely to see.

TnaG's recent broadcasts have underlined, rather than qualified, the achievements of that team. Looking at their matches over 12 years of unparalleled success, viewers will notice that the football isn't always of lyrical quality and that legendary footballers were well capable of having off-days.

The team's greatness lay in the fact that every year they went out to compete with teams who were waiting in the long grass, determined to topple them and - with the obvious exception of their first year and maybe 1978, when comparatively less was expected of them - eight times in 12 years, they won the All-Ireland.

Was it very dull to cover this endless triumph, I once asked a more experienced colleague. No, he said, because at the start of every year, no one knew what was going to happen. It only looks dull in retrospect.

Kerry's achievement didn't happen because their supreme skills guaranteed them victories. It happened because they applied themselves year in and year out to making sure that their advantages were hammered home. The 1990s is scattered with teams who should have won more than they did and this gives an inkling of what Kerry achieved in those years.

Now that team has been laid to rest, as it were, and that too is good for the county.

2) Maurice Fitzgerald's performance pleased many people because it crowned a career that for a long time looked cursed by bad timing. It's hard to think of an All-Ireland final where one player was so far ahead of the other 29.

It was particularly pleasing because Fitzgerald had been so frequently traduced by mean minds who were quick to mock his talent because it so often lacked the showcase of a good team. In Pairc Ui Chaoimh in 1992, his display was majestic as Kerry beat Cork by 10 points.

In the dressing-room afterwards he was talking to some of his friends. I wasn't in the quotes business that day and anyway it was known even then that Maurice preferred - in the favoured phrase of last week - "to let his football do the talking".

But in a brief and unique departure from the lofty objectivity of the trade, I tapped his shoulder, introduced myself and - being uncomfortable because he looked uncomfortable - mumbled a less than articulate tribute to his performance. No notebook, no tape recorder - just, for a moment, a slightly overawed admirer with a reporter's access.

TWO YEARS later when Cork beat Kerry in the Pairc, I heard a jubilant Corkie exclaim: "Maurice Fitzgerald must be de most overrated player". It was hard to be even annoyed at this display of bad judgment and lousy memory.

3) There are thoughts for lots of people in Kerry. Throughout the awful years, they persevered as things went horribly wrong. Everyone knew a period of adjustment would be needed after the great successes of the 1970s and '80s, but few believed it would be so harrowing.

Two events are usually mentioned as perfect reflections of the GAA: a Munster hurling final in Thurles and a Munster football final in Killarney. I'm a respecter of the first, but a hopeless devotee of the latter.

Conversations with Kerry football people are highlights of this job. There is a combination of knowledge - about nearly any county - and wisdom or perspective that brings home the golden rule of GAA journalism - that it should never aspire to the didactic, but merely reflect the quality of an informed saloon-bar discussion.

That wisdom is apparent in the county's officialdom and it is tempered with a remarkable generosity of spirit. After a merciless beating in the 1991 All-Ireland under-21 final by Tyrone, Tony O'Keeffe, the country secretary, said that it was no humiliation, rather an honour, to have shared a final with such an outstanding team.

County chairman Sean Kelly endured much vitriol over the lean years, having taken office in 1987 and waiting all that time for the county's boat to come in. In 1992 after one of the most horrendous episodes of the 11 years - the Munster final defeat by Clare - his genuine tribute to the opposition was testament to that Kerry quality of generosity.

It has been a great weekend for Paidi O Se and Seamus MacGearailt and their team. But it's also a great weekend for all the ordinary people who have kept the GAA ticking over in the county during difficult times. Welcome back.