Keith Duggan talks to the former Mayo star and current selector about chasing the old dream from a new vantage point

"A lot of people felt I wasn't 100 per cent committed to Mayo football because I always played basketball. They are entitled to that opinion. But I reckon I'd be a wino on the streets now if I didn't play basketball. That's what kept me sane. I played in six All-Ireland football finals. Drew one and lost five. And that can take a lot out of a fella."

- Liam McHale.

The shout. So full of fury and frustration, it gave him a pang of nostalgia for his playing days.

"Hey! McHale! Is this the fucking shite we are going to have to put up with this year?"

He did not recognise the antagonist, only his pain. The man was just another lover of Mayo football, hurt and eternally confused, not sure if he wanted a fight or a hug. On dark days, the hardcore of Mayo football fans carry a sense of disillusionment deeper than Vietnam vets. Habitually, they fly from the murky throng on tired afternoons in every football ground in Ireland to put Liam McHale through an inquisition about the torments of Mayo football.

This latest howl from the wilderness presented itself in Fermanagh, after a league game of no consequence to the western county. The funny thing was that McHale and team manager John Maughan and George Golden were leaving the field in fine spirits. In losing, their team had shown signs of high learning, if also the traditional Mayo penchant for astonishing wides.

News filtered through that Cavan had lost elsewhere, a result that put Fermanagh back in Croke Park for the first time since the Beatles were young. Pandemonium broke loose and the Mayo men could not help but be touched by the delight of the northern men. They were glad to share in it and walked off the field amused and optimistic. Then, out of the blue, came the shout, high-pitched and desperate. McHale, a seasoned diplomat, replied as honestly as he could as his fellow county man looked on, half in hope and half in hell.

"Jesus, man, I don't know. Sure how am I supposed to know?"

Gaelic football almost failed to snatch the soul of Liam McHale. His was one that could and maybe should have escaped the hallucinatory glories of big-time championship football, with its narcotic promise that the next season will carry all your dreams. Flick back in time to 1985. Ireland was dreary and punch-drunk and the west of the Shannon was lapsing into one vast, deserted village. In towns like Ballina, you were doing well if you had the price of smokes and, as John Healy had forewarned, thousands were sailing from Mayo for the glittering spires of far-off cities.

Getting out was the only viable plan and for 17-year-old McHale, an unlikely basketball prodigy on Killala Bay, it came offered on a silver platter. Come to the land of Hope and Glory, play ball in our burnished college theatres and hear how sweetly the cheerleaders sing your name.

Gooooooh Liam! McHale bit his lip and equivocated and took several suitors around to his local for pints.

"Howya, Jim. This is Paul from Drexel in Philadelphia. Throw on a couple there." Finally, he said no to the dream and no one shouted stop.

"See, I never had any ambition to leave Ballina," McHale says now, some 20 years later. He is lean and fit and on a schizophrenic Irish May day he is wearing shorts and a hoops tee-shirt and drinking coffee in a bar where everybody knows him by his Christian name.

Liam. A Ballina Brave. He never left. Think that makes him sound Small Town? He'll live with that. He will take that as much as a compliment as a slur.

Against his better judgment, the youngest McHale kicked football again last Saturday evening. Ballina were out against Charlestown in the championship and, on a filthy wet night, the 37-year-old was introduced, as they say, for the last 10 minutes. A late home goal saved the day. As luck had it, he was just back from a week in the Canaries so the McHale tan, once the signature note for glamour in these parts, was at its truest mahogany.

"God, I was as nervous. Sure I hadn't played in three years. Went all right I suppose. Caught a few balls."

Like all great footballers who have heard the bell for last orders tolling more than once, McHale places value on the clear thump of every ball he kicks now.

The ending of his intercounty life was swift and locally dramatic. As is always the case, its emissary was someone he would never have expected. Pat Holmes. Quiet and unimposing Pat, a man he had gone to war with for over a decade. Pat was the new manager, and in the autumn of 1999 he sat Liam down in an empty dressing-room and quietly told him to drop the basketball. Hinted in his soft way that the big fella was getting too old.

"And it was a fair point. But I knew the basketball kept me sharp, knew I'd be ready for him by the championship. I just couldn't quit the game, it was too good for me."

But Pat, in his calm, whispering way, insisted. An ultimatum was delivered and McHale felt he had no choice. In the Mayo News, Kevin McStay announced McHale was finished. There was some keening, some condolences, and some saying good riddance. The anticipated mixed bag.

"I have friends in the Western People upset about not getting the news first. But McStay asked me straight out and I told him."

It had to catch up with him sooner or later. It was McHale's genius and folly to have high-wired his way through a high-profile football life while becoming the greatest ever Irish basketball player. If you think McHale is small-town, then you should just listen to his hoops escapades for half an hour. Here is just one.

In the summer of 1993, Mayo were spiritually massacred in an All-Ireland semi-final by Cork. Nursing wounds, McHale skipped to Boston to kick some ball for money and to shoot some ball for love. Every morning, he used to go down to a court in West Roxbury, then the city's hotspot for casual murder. First day, himself and Paul McStay spy two homeboys just lolling about in the misty pre-noon heat. It is already about 90 degrees, the court sizzling and the entire city smelling like a bakery.

"Well lads. Are yez up for a game?"

"No way, dude. This heat is a killer."

But McHale pesters and charms and eventually persuades the local boys to play. He returns to where McStay stands delighted. His friend is biting his lip.

"Do you know who that is?" he hisses.

"Haven't a clue."

"That's fucking well Reggie Lewis."

McHale looks at this lithe, beautiful ebony figure and recognition dawns. Sure enough, it's the Prince of New England basketball, a local hero being courted by the Boston Celtics as The Future.

"We lost 21-19. McStay killed his fella but I struggled on Reggie, now, to be fair. But we sat down to talk afterwards because during the game me and McStay were fucking each other out of it and the two boys were getting worried. But he was asking all about Ireland and I was saying if the Celtics didn't work out, sure we'd set him up across in Ballina. And he was polite, like, saying thanks and he'd think about it! We met once a week to play for the rest of the summer."

Then the leaves began to fall and Lewis walked towards mega-deals and superstardom, anointed by Jordan as his most difficult opponent and Liam took a bus out to Logan for a flight home to where mind-numbing and savage training sessions awaited in Tubber.

It was as if he led two lives. A year later, Mayo entered the New Darkness, falling to Leitrim in the Connacht football final, 2-4 to 0-12. To add an exquisite spice to the anguish, Leitrim's leader was a Mayo man, John O'Mahony. In the heartland, The Mayo Vets, they were at their most angst-ridden. That Sunday night, Liam was out with Sinead (McStay, a local girl, a sister of Paul's - like he says, he never wanted to leave) and from the cobwebs came the distraught and the angry. The man was pissed drunk. Sinead wanted to leave. McHale told the guy to leave them alone, that they could talk about it again.

"You have to talk to me, McHale. I paid good money. I paid ten quid in to see you play."

It was the fuse that lit him.

"Do you think I saw any of your money?"

In the years after that, a realisation hit McHale. By his late twenties, he had found a new reason to persist with Gaelic football. Fear. Nothing else. He was frightened that if he quit, Mayo would probably go and win its first All-Ireland since 1951 without him. And he wasn't sure he could stomach that.

It makes a bittersweet tale, McHale's football fortunes. Most famous is the unforgettable and brutal 1996 series against Meath.

In the draw, McHale was the best player in the land; six minutes into the replay, he was the game's most poignant victim, sitting on an ice-box holding a cloth to a bloody lip, watching while Meath inflicted a new brand of torture on the county. Kepak Kamikaze. Sent off; a man more sinned against than sinning. He can still replay every sequence of that day like it is a horror movie he directed.

"There are a lot of reasons we didn't win it. Maybe we lacked a bit of subtlety. Dunno about bad luck. But then the first day, when we were six points up and I took a shot that hit the inside of the post and it came to James Horan and he had a shot that hit the post and then they came away and got a point, well, you wonder about that."

You listen to McHale talk about the quest and this majestic summer entity takes on a new hue. Far from being a story about dreams and hopes, maybe the All-Ireland championship is something that tears strips off your heart just for fun. The All-Ireland Championship Ruins Your Life. Try that for a tag line.

Regret. That is the word McHale uses most often about Gaelic football. At 19, he sat on the bench for the 1985 All-Ireland football semi-final. A long time ago now. But he smelled the beer wafting in from the crowds and the noise thrilled him. It carried with it the promise of All-Irelands; it flattered and seduced him. He believed.

By 1996, the same sound was haunting. That loss to Meath was like bereavement almost, with people crying tears of consolation and hugging him. He just wanted to get drunk with Sean and Anthony, the brothers, glad for the cradle of Ballina. He felt bewildered and wronged and, late into pints, he felt like a loser among a county of losers.

A year later, Mayo were back in the All-Ireland final against Kerry. Heartbreak, of course, and by now McHale had a sensation that it just was not going to happen. No All-Ireland medal. Nothing to do but join the chorus of mournful near glories.

And that is why Liam McHale will roam the sidelines this summer. To try to help the new sons of Mayo avoid the sins of their fathers and their fathers' fathers. It will not be easy. After the Fermanagh howl came another surprise. In the dressing-room, Kieran McDonald was holding his head in his hands. If McHale was Mayo's Greek god in the last decade, then McDonald was to be her Nordic superstar for these new times, blond and ephemeral and gifted.

"I'm packing it in," he told McHale. "I can do it for Crossmolina and I can't fucking do it for the county. I have had enough. I can't do it."

McDonald played poorly and heard bitter Mayo protests from behind the wire. Not many, but salt on a raw wound nonetheless.

The older man had waged such wars within himself many, many times and he put his arm around McDonald, told him to forget it. John Maughan said to take a week off. But Saturday came and Kieran didn't show for training. A day later, Maughan got a call. McDonald said sorry, but he couldn't face it.

"He is gone," says Liam now, marvelling. "Like, we were going to give him the team, à la Greg Blaney or Martin McHugh. He was going to be ball handler. Like, I'm not criticising Kieran, he's a friend of mine. I just wish he had spoken to John or myself. Because he is a fantastic player and if he wants to reach the next level, to judge himself against the likes of Maurice Fitz, he needs to come back and see if he can lead Mayo to an All-Ireland. But he is gone for the time being. Like, it's too serious now. If lads don't want to play, you can't make them."

Gaelic football has reached a higher plane in recent years, he thinks. Imagination is filtering through again and the dull, limiting physicality is falling out of vogue. Gone is the numbing toughness of Maughan's first regime. Training is still supremely demanding, but brightened with SAQ drills and constant ball work. Afterwards, the players hop into tubs of iced water to kill off the lactic acid. Precision and preparation are everywhere and McHale is glad to be an apprentice, watching Maughan, whose Army ways are as exact as his own are chaotic.

Listen, regret is Gaelic games' eternal gift to Liam McHale. It comes each summer in the pretty packaging of the newly-mown season, trembling with the heartbeat of all the young hopefuls. He is no fool. His is just one of a thousand GAA stories, but the legacy of his talent leaves him among a select few. He recognises he has been luckier than most. Sometimes he meets guys from long-forgotten passages of sporting heat and notes how passing time and missed opportunities and plain life have hardened them. Liam McHale has managed to preserve his humour and his dignity, his breeding through the good days and bad.

He thinks of those innocent days sparring with the great Lewis on the burning asphalt of Boston. See, Reggie had it all taken away from him a few quick years later, his life erased one random morning by a hidden heart defect as he was shooting around, one second a god for Celtics fans, a young man with family and master of his domain, the next second in the sweet hereafter.

"He was just a class guy. Really class. The poor fella."

It gives him perspective when he thinks about the polished medal that is missing from his cabinet, from his existence. McHale's All-Ireland. It just wasn't to be.

So tonight, against Charlestown, Ballina's most famous son may play a bit part in the local championship. They say you don't leave the game, that someday it quietly walks out on you. But that is not quite true.

You fight, you hang on with what grace you can, and on the eve of yet another All-Ireland season you walk the dingy streets of your beloved home town with a spring in your soul, a bounce born of habit that will stay with you until you die.