From Kentucky Park in Ardara to the pitches around Gweedore, silence has replaced the seething, impassioned lyricism of local championship fare. All has been gladly suspended, until after Sunday at least.

Five years have passed since the Donegal team marched around Clones alongside Derry, on a drenched, infamous Ulster final Sunday. And they were champions then.

"Does it feel like five years? To be honest, it often seems like only yesterday," muses Barry McGowan. "I suppose that's because the years in between have been essentially forgettable."

Donegal's recent footballing history orbits stubbornly around their unprecedented championship year in 1992, and sometimes the Killybegs man can't help but marvel at how swiftly and irreversibly those times unravelled.

"I suppose the day Derry beat us in that Ulster final marked the end of the 1992 team. True enough, most of the lads stuck it out for a while after that, but when Brian (McEniff) decided to leave a year later, it was a bit of a shock to everyone, I think, and PJ (McGowan) had to pick up the pieces."

Barry McGowan was 22 when McEniff threw him into a league game against Kerry, which the player remembers vividly for the presence of Jack O'Shea and Charlie Nelligan. "Just to be on the pitch with players like that was an honour. I think Manus (Boyle) kicked a wonderful free to win the game for us, though."

McEniff converted McGowan from half forward to defender and he quickly evolved into an elegant, composed and deeply influential individual: a natural ball-player who exalted the county's passing tradition.

"I believe he is probably the best corner back playing the game right now," said McEniff this week. "He has always had this quiet self-assurance which has helped him dominate the local scene with Killybegs. He is just one of those quality lads, a great role model."

Growing up in the thriving, sprawling and fiercely tight fishing port, McGowan's childhood, like most youngsters, was shaped by sport. When Jimmy White decided to resurrect an ailing Gaelic tradition in the town in the late 1970s, McGowan arrived for the first under-12 session with a bunch of pals. They famously skipped through their adolescent years bagging every underage trophy in sight. In 1988, Killybegs won its first county title since the 1950s and the core of the team went on to dominate club football in the 1990s. Seven of that group were involved in the victorious All-Ireland under-21 team of 1987; four would go to on to pick up senior medals with Donegal.

"I suppose the fact that a lot of us had played together for so long made it easy to blend in at county level later on. But when you're a youngster, you just play for enjoyment."

And so the mid-1980s were passed in cramped cars and open fields and all made sustainable by the craic. Soccer is also firmly rooted in Killybegs, and, although he spent a year at Finn Harps, the fierce workrate behind Killybegs' success and the spiralling fortunes of the intercounty team drew him solely towards Gaelic. Donegal were emerging with grace and uncertainty and quietly went about making it to Croke Park in September of 1992.

"I don't remember much about the final. I had a wee bit of shoulder trouble and I was wondering if I should cry off. But I thought, `damn it, I'm at peak fitness and I don't want to miss this'."

Ten minutes in and the pain evaporated. He still remains touched by the raw torrent of gratitude which welled within the county over the following months. There seemed to be a brief, impalpable shift in perceptions between the county, lying hard against the Border, and the rest of Ireland. For once, the northwest was the focus.

Throughout the winter, it seemed like those days would never fade. Except they did, as ethereally and unbelievably as they had arrived. "It's funny, I look at this Derry team now and it's like a mirror image of ourselves in the early '90s," McGowan reflected this week. "They seem to have that swagger and winning air about them.

"We had the upper hand on them at the start, but after 1993 they began beating us and most teams with a sort of nonchalant ease. And it became worrying."

He can't explain why Donegal football lulled for a while. "It got to the point where you were, if not accepting loss, just saying, well, there's another one down the drain."

After Donegal lost two league finals and endured a few torrid - and short - championship summers, sentiment was done down by impatience. "Time for new blood" became the mantra. Forget about 1992. A number of gnarled and seemingly irreplaceable veterans stepped away with no encore, and Declan Bonner, new to the job, fired freshmen into the pale heat of league football. Results led to the proclamation of a new era.

And yet the links with 1992 remain as steadfast as ever. Bonner played that year, as did his selectors. Jim McGuinness, the whirling dervish of a midfielder, was a teenage panellist. And throughout the lines remain key players from that era: Noel Hegarty, McGowan, Manus and Tony Boyle. James McHugh on the bench. Gratifying for Brian McEniff to see embers of that team yet. "I'd really enjoy Sunday if I wasn't kicking every ball in my head," he says.

And for Barry McGowan? "Well, the comparisons with 1992 are obvious, but we try to play more directly now. We played short against Cavan, but that was from necessity. Derry will be very hard. We just have to take on the responsibility."

The freshness has returned for him now. The old buzz is alive on the streets again and slowly the nerves have begun to tingle.

But when the ball is thrown up, instinct will subsume him, leaving him poised and controlled in the rapturous haze of another Ulster final. Five years have gone since his last Ulster final, but that much stays the same.