The memory is televisual, as if it had all happened in slow motion right there on the crystal bucket. The ruck passes across the mind's eye frame by frame. Slow and soundless. They might have been underwater. The scrap in last year's All-Ireland final replay. Ray Dempsey challenged John McDermott. The ball squirted to Darren Fay. Dempsey and Anthony Finnerty converged high on Fay. Martin O'Connell and Colm Coyle took exception.

And enter the big guy. Liam McHale, feet first into fiasco. Whatever his intent, McHale made no contact with the main protagonists but slipped between a rock and a hard place and into deeper trouble. In the moments which followed he wasn't without sin, but more than anyone else he was certainly sinned against. Of all the sideshows that day the one involving McHale was the ugliest. At one point he endured a kick from behind delivered by a passing warrior, then he is jumped on from behind and while bent over he takes a few blows to the face. Then it's back to scuffling with McDermott.

Frame by frame, punch for punch, pound for pound, McHale was probably about 10th on the list of people who deserved to be sent off that afternoon. The big guy has a way of getting lodged in the memory, however. He and Colm Coyle took the walk. The Mayo bench gazed at the big guy as he approached them but his eyes were somewhere else.

McHale sat down and felt his bruises and explored the land of what might have been. Every other head turned back to the game.

The big guy saunters through the lobby. He's got a scuzz of Desperate Dan stubble on his face. He is swaddled in a white tracksuit and topped off with a University of Massachussetts baseball cap. He looks like six and a half foot of prime athlete, does Liam McHale.

He saunters. He knows it. The saunter is McHale's signature, his trademark, the superficially defining characteristic for which he is by turns treasured and abused.

He looks at himself on the telly sometimes and during those pellmell moments where his gut comes close to bursting and his legs weigh like lead, lo and behold, he appears to canter while the rest of the pack gallops. "Strange stride pattern," he says.

And for his trouble, for his height, for his stride pattern, for his love of two sports and for his easy, open nature, he has been cursed with a drizzle of faint praise. The ambivalent, grudging affection of the fineday big-game brigade. He is a lightning rod for the Mayo mood. King of the hill on good days. An easy target on bad ones.

Mayo manager John Maughan says: "People have never appreciated him, or the sacrifices he has made. Liam has suffered. If he plays badly, because he's the big guy people get on his back. It's wrong. I'd have to say I hardly ever have to stand up and give Liam McHale a rollicking because he works so hard. I could never see myself falling out with him. He's so positive you'd have to have good time for him if you knew him."

A year on from Meath and all that radioactive fall-out, McHale is back in Croke Park for another moment of twilight spent in the big time.

Maybe he'll sign off tomorrow. His legs are tired and his ankle has been torn up more times than he can remember. His hamstring has betrayed him three times in two years and on the days after heavy training sessions he has to take one careful step at a time.

"I have pain in the ankle all the time," he says. He's not complaining about it, just marvelling at how fluently the body drains itself of youth. "I've a lot of mileage on the clock between the two games."

Two games. A footballer and a hoopster.

An agent in Brussels, Bob Stanley, was on to Liam last year and this year again waving temptations. Professional basketball and some nice money. Sustenance for the present and the future.

"There are loads of teams with loads of money but I have enjoyed the football," he says. "If I won an All-Ireland this year and Bob got on to me next year I might give it one season. I don't know, though, I am rooted here. Engaged. Getting married. I like Ballina."

He might as well be a mason, a grand wizard of his lodge, as be one of the greatest basketball players this country has ever produced. Basketball is merely the harlot which makes a cuckold of the GAA. A fancy distraction which makes McHale soft and easy to abuse.

He loves it.

"If the Bosman ruling had come in years ago I don't know, it might have been different. I would probably be playing basketball in Europe now. It's just the way it has developed. No big deal about it. I look at teams and I know I would make some nice money. There are people out there playing and making nice money that I know I am better than. That's fair enough. You make your choice."

He made his choice and it was hard. More so than people know. He retired from football two years ago, fed up with the suffocating politics of Mayo football. Stifled too by the endless criticisms. "My critics have always doubted my commitment," he says. His shaking head says it all. No need to elaborate on the truncated international basketball career, the forsaken basketball scholarship opportunity in the States, the deep personal sacrifices and the ritual offering up of blood, sweat and tears for Mayo.

Maughan cajoled him back. The past two summers have provided a surprising epilogue to a novel football career but basketball has always been there. The hardwood court is where he feels most comfortable still.

When he retired in 1995 he struck out for the new world. He played football for the Mayo club in Boston ("I'd get a rash if I wore any other jersey.") with a gang of old school-friends. That summer was an easy-going version of his life. "Chip Greenberg, who I played basketball with in Ballina, put a team together while we were there. Myself, Brian McStay and D J Naylor from home plus seven Americans. We played summer league basketball in Boston and won the thing. Two nights a week basketball and trained with the football two nights a week. Brilliant. Made some nice money and had great crack."

America had always attracted him. The sport, the immensity, the openness. He wanders around soaking it all in, a big open guy who takes life as it comes.

"I'm a bit like Crocodile Dundee when I'm over there. I get lost. I used go out occasionally and see the Boston Celtics train. Dee Brown and Dominique Wilkins and Eric Montross. I'd go out and chat with them. They were serious athletes and decent fellas. I love all that." McHale sauntering out, talking hoops with the NBA millionaires. He took life on the bounce. In the end, though, he missed Ballina and Mayo.

"I consider myself a lucky guy to have been able to come back and play in a couple of All-Ireland finals. One of the best Mayo players ever would have been Ger Geraghty from Ballintubber. He left at 22. He would have been one of the best footballers ever to have played for Mayo. He's in Chicago now. Another guy would have been Padraig Duffy, a Kevin McStay type of player. He's in Chicago too. There was a family from the Breaffy area, fine players, the Walshes, three of them. Gone. There's five off the top of my head in America who would have played for Mayo if they had stayed home. I'm lucky."

When he came back Maughan wanted him to play winter league football. So on basketball weekends he drove. Through the night from Killarney to Wexford once. From Tralee to Fermanagh another night. Just to slog through Division Three league games. He left his hoop-mates as they nestled into snugs and conversations and he headed for the car. He would arrive in some far-flung hotel in the dead of night while the Mayo team slept. "I remember the worst thing is when you are doing the warm-up with the team. Totally exhausted. Wondering what you are doing there."

Worth it though. During the long summer of three years ago, when in his mind he had retired from toplevel football, it struck him that he was fed up with the game. Stale upstairs and aching downstairs.

Maughan has kick-started him again. Wrung the last from him perhaps as a midfielder and turned him into a full forward for tomorrow.

"We trained on the beach in Enniscrone one night after the Sligo game and John was calling out the team and it came to midfield and I wasn't there. I thought `What's going on here'. I thought it would be centre half forward but no sign there either. By the time he called me out at full forward it was a relief."

He's missed one training session since Christmas. He came back in poor enough shape after his suspension and hauling himself out on cold nights was torture heaped upon torture until April when the sun seemed to feed his muscles.

Tomorrow his new job will distract him as the minutes slip past. He has a habit of standing in beside the full back which he wants to break. Keep moving and stay focused, he'll tell himself again and again before the knock on the door comes.

Twelve years down and McHale has perhaps one afternoon left. Seventy minutes and much to prove. Slates to wipe clean and ghosts to soothe.

The abiding memory of him from last year's final replay is his big frame always at the centre of the picture in that great rough-and-tumble scatter across the Hill 16 end. He'd been sent off once before in his career, in a Connacht final against Roscommon, and he remembers that he argued with the referee long and hard that afternoon.

Last September he just gaped. His body was still too busy absorbing the shock of the preceding violence to register the meaning of the sternly pointed finger.

"I just walked off the pitch. I honestly didn't realise everything that had gone on. I took some heavy punches to the head and I remember asking Kevin O'Neill questions about what went on. It took 10 minutes at least before I knew what had happened.

"I remember going on at half-time and asking the referee was it all right for me to come on again at the end if we were going into extra time. I'd never been in that situation before, never thought it through."

After the game he couldn't go upstairs in Croke Park with the rest of his team. He needed space and air. He skipped the reception and dinner and went to a pub out in Howth with a friend. Didn't watch the Sunday Game. Avoided talking to people.

"I travelled home with the team on Monday night but I still couldn't face people. We went to the Welcome Inn and the team had something to eat. I slipped out the back door with Sinead. Later on at about one in the morning I went for a few pints with a few friends of mine from home. People who wouldn't hassle me."

That's how it ended. 1989 was similar. The same emptiness when the music stopped. His father Tony died on the night of the drawn Connacht final. Liam remembers leaving the stereo up in the room with him in the morning so he could listen to the game. That night he just slipped away."

"My mother is always on to me to retire," he says. "To give it up to hell out of that. She knows the sacrifices and she thinks I'm getting old. It would mean a lot for her and for my brothers especially if I was to win an All-Ireland medal. It would mean a lot to the whole family.

"I was hoping to win it in 1989 in honour of my father. We had a good run and people say maybe I was inspired by it. I was leaving for the Connacht final and we knew he was dying and would be dead in a couple of days but because of him dying on the day of a Connacht final it means more to me and the family."

The slow motion past shapes the short-term future. This means more. This means the most. One last big day.

And?

Exit the big guy. Sauntering, win or lose.