GAELIC GAMES: Sorry. It wasn't so much an age of innocence as a few days of fleeting madness. For a little while this summer, though, we thought all the talk of Gaelic football having a Big Three might just have been a little too pat and a tad too premature.

Then, in the space of eight days, Armagh destroyed Laois, Tyrone smote Dublin and, finally, Kerry razed Cork. There is a trinity. We believe. Sorry if we strayed from orthodoxy.

Kerry, the All-Ireland champions, are the first side to step into this year's final. The hurdle, as provided by Cork yesterday, proved surprisingly insignificant, but Kerry showed some style in leaping over it anyway.

Cork were the latest side to deceive us into doubting the existence of a big three. They looked pretty in the Munster final and didn't have too much trouble with a young Galway team last day out.

There's different levels, though. There's pub singers and there's the Three Tenors In football's brave new world, though you have to measure all these things in a different way from before.

Those occasions lacked the great, raw-boned physicality and the scorched-earth intensity of what we have seen elsewhere. Kerry are preserving themselves for that sort of rumble. Dublin and Laois have succumbed already.

Next Sunday, Armagh and Tyrone will provide the intensity in apocalyptic platefuls. You judge everything in Gaelic football these days according to its resistance to white heat.

Poor Cork, well-managed and constructed by Billy Morgan, thought they'd found the pace of the game early on yesterday when they cantered through for a couple of early points, one a free and the other a nice score from Phillip Clifford after four minutes.

The retribution was swift and awesome. Cork wouldn't score from play again for another 51 minutes. They would spend much of that period worrying about Colm 'The Gooch' Cooper.

Kerry's tactical acuity is always interesting. Yesterday it boiled down to We Have a Gooch and We're Going to Use Him. They pulled Declan O'Sullivan out of the full forward position, had Bryan Sheehan run around as a decoy duck and lobbed lovely diagonal balls at Gooch. He battles for each one as if his oxygen supply depends on it.

After 16 minutes he had four points from play. After 17 minutes Billy Morgan had to make the tough call and withdraw his clubman Niall Geary from his task of marking the Gooch. Nobody likes to be taken off early in a game. Then again, nobody likes being roasted on a spit either.

Kieran O'Connor came on and took a sterner hand to the task of marking Cooper. For his part Cooper switched to setting up scores. He had another point himself and hit the post with a shot that should have been his goal, but wound up being Eoin Brosnan's.

The use of Gooch wasn't Kerry's only tactical triumph. They pulled the vaunted Cork half-back line into places they just didn't want to go.

So successful were they in this matter that they won a large majority of the game's kick-outs and choked off Cork's supply to the inside lines.

In the end Kerry's dominance was so complete that full back Mike McCarthy was able to move upfield and handpass the ball over the Cork bar for the final score of the game. Only the fact he was a full back and not well versed in such things stopped him from taking a goal instead.

There were times in the match when Cork people must have felt physically ill at what they were seeing. Kerry can be like that.

After 20 minutes they were leading by eight points to two and they began to warm up three subs: Mike Frank Russell, Dara Ó Cinnéide and Declan Quill. The most ostentatious show of power since the May Days when almost the entire Red Army used to goose-step past the Kremlin.

"We felt there was a bit of improvement left in the team," said Jack O'Connor with characteristic understatement afterwards. "Our dream all year is to try and retain the All-Ireland. We have a bit of work ahead."

The bit of work is either Armagh or Tyrone. Sure we just have to get through Gallipoli to reach Istanbul.

"Any fear of the two Ulster counties?" asked another Kerryman. "Well, we're only playing one of them," said Jack. "It will be fascinating because, obviously, there's a contrast in styles between the northern football and the southern football.

"It's a great challenge for management and players to adapt our game and to take them on. We're not looking at revenge, but redemption."

Redemption. The final is already quite a prospect. The Gooch running at Francie Bellew or getting some thrash talking from Ryan McMenamin? Kerry's old-style athleticism against the brawnier Northern challenge.

Last year's All-Ireland win was one thing, but in Kerry they still remember the humiliations of 2002 and 2003.

Cork's manager Billy Morgan, while graciously conceding defeat to a better-equipped team, cited a little jersey-pulling and a little cynicism in this Kerry outfit. "And they complain about Armagh?" he said pointedly.

That's all that's left to the rest of us, though. To measure Kerry, Tyrone and Armagh against each other. To complain and compare and contrast and finally to imitate.

There is a Big Three. It's their world. The rest of us just live in it and fill out the fixtures.