LockerRoom: I saw Gerry Adams coming out of Croke Park on Saturday. Now Gerry never looks like he's just heard a thighslapper and he had seen the Antrim hurlers a little earlier but he looked worried.

Who could blame him? The Ulster final in its own odd way is as close to an expression of partitionism as Northern Nationalist culture gets. The Ulster final is defiantly, gloriously, in your face, different.

The Punch 'n' Judy show loses something, of course, by being staged in Croke Park. I think what Croker finals lack most keenly is the feeling that we soft Southerners have been made to suffer somewhat in order to partake of the occasion.

Ulster final days in Clones are penitential. We have to head out of Dublin and into the traffic, which might start at Dundalk or Butlersbridge or wherever, depending on who is playing. For an hour and a half before we get close to Clones we debate hotly whether or not to dump the vehicle and continue on foot.

Being Southerners, being boozy optimists, we make Deliverance jokes and drive the car as close as possible to the ground, whereupon some sour geezer in an orange bib who has just got in touch with his inner fascist waves away the meekly proffered press pass and points, referee-like, at some point back near Finglas where you should have parked.

You do all that and then run the gauntlet of the various security checks and interrogation points the Ulster Council have mounted around the ground. I was watching that movie Sliding Doors the other night and the motif running through one segment was John Hannah repeatedly (and annoyingly in his cloying sort of way) saying to Gwyneth Paltrow, "Remember what the Python boys used to say - nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition."

John Hannah has obviously never tried to get into Clones for a big match. You always expect the Spanish Inquisition. You expect Torquemada. You expect thumbscrews.

Enough of that anyway. Enough talk of Clones; the memories are undoing the work we have done with our patient therapist.

(Save of course to say that perhaps the best year in Clones was the year when the ground was a virtual building site and it rained torrentially for most of the day. Cars on the knolls around Clones which serve as car parks began to slip downwards. The lorry upon which we media folk had been installed began to move about in the mud. Everybody was soaked, dirty and miserable and the match was denounced as the worst ever. Perfect.)

On Saturday the entire show was brought to Dublin again. For various reasons some 30,000 or so of the original attendance from a fortnight ago sent messages saying they'd just remembered they had something on and hoped everyone would have a nice day without them. Those who attended were principally Ulster fundamentalists. We didn't even hear anyone moan about the cruddy three-euro programme, which didn't so much as offer the scorelines from the Ulster Championship which we had gathered to bring to a close.

When it was all done, when the casualties on each side had been enumerated and the yellow and red cards totted by independent observers from an auditing company, the man presenting the cup to Kieran McGeeney made a spiky speech about how what we had just witnessed was anything but "puke football". When Pat Spillane first coined that phrase concerning the quality of Ulster football he should have patented it and made his second million. The words rankle in a way few other things do. The "puke football" slur is there implanted under Northern skin and it irritates and requires so much scratching simply because it was uttered by a Kerryman.

Northern football has always sought approval from the Kingdom and if not approval then some form of benign recognition from the game's leading franchise. Through the years Kerry have generally swatted Northern teams away with whatever came to hand. Antrim in 1946 went home sore and bitter from their semi-final experience. Ditto Armagh a few years later.

Then the Down team of the 1960s arrived and their sense of flash and confidence was such that they set the seeds of a record which still exists. Down don't lose to Kerry in championship football. Down, of course, are the Dubs of the North and they grow taller when they swagger.

Down's captain Joe Lennon helpfully wrote a book on coaching for football champions. It wasn't a bestseller in the churlish Kingdom. I remember, fadó, fadó, after the 1991 All-Ireland final, a couple of us impossibly young and fresh-faced hacks being on the bus back to Newry with the triumphant Down side. At Dundalk a man stepped aboard and leaned over to Conor Deegan, who was sitting in front of us. He said to Conor, "I saw John O'Keeffe play many times and you're the equal of him." Conor Deegan nodded and as the man got off turned to whoever was beside him and asked, "Who the hell is John O'Keeffe?"

The story doesn't really lose anything whether you take it that Deegan genuinely didn't know who O'Keeffe was or was just pretending he didn't. It was the sort of thing which makes Down different from their neighbours. Their implacability in the face of the green and gold, their sheer indifference to tradition, set them apart in the North and yet somehow continues to ensure that Kerry football will always treat the Northern Gaels with suspicion.

That's part of what makes this year's championship so interesting. Armagh and Tyrone have learned the hard way about Kerry. They've overcome the phobia which Down never had. In the early 90s, when Ulster won four titles in a row, Kerry were struggling. Down indeed dispatched them without scarcely a second glance in the 1991 All-Ireland semi-final and the following year Clare beat them down south. It was a pity the novelty of Northern winners was tested only against moderate Kerry sides.

This summer, though, the sense of pending showdown is as keen as it ever was in a Gary Cooper western. The genie is out of the bottle. Kevin Heffernan once said that any All-Ireland win where you beat Kerry along the way is like a double All-Ireland. Tyrone and Armagh have that double sustenance inside them now and meet Kerry as equals.

It was up to Kerry to limp away and learn the lessons of 2002 and 2003. There weren't going to be any more years like those of the 70s and 80s, when Northern teams folded like cheap deckchairs. Nor even years like 1997 or 2000, when Ulster boys could reliably be put away when the pressure was on.

Kerry won last year's All-Ireland, skimming past Derry in the semi-final, but noting in the backs of their minds how Tyrone and Armagh, the surprise casualties of the previous knockout round, would have differed in terms of the physicality and intensity of their challenge. This whole season has been a long drum roll. Kerry, Armagh and Tyrone: a tripartite championship. A winner from anywhere else will be a shock.

Saturday's Ulster final was different from any of the other three provincial finals. Kerry will have watched and wondered and then played back the tape looking for cracks and weaknesses. Kerry know they can get better but wonder if they will. Armagh and Tyrone know they need to reproduce that intensity on another couple of afternoons at least.

Other teams will have watched and wilted, though. Armagh and Tyrone are relentless, indefatigable and possessed of some of the finest players in the country. They'll be looking at September.

The Ulster final on Saturday served as a statement as much as anything else. We're down to the last shakings and four of the surviving teams are from Ulster. Two of them are Tyrone and Armagh. Here are the relevant cvs and business cards.

It's different and it's irresistible, the Ulster final. Unperfumed by market research or PR. Sauced by nothing but raw hunger and grudging respect. Armagh and Tyrone march on, representing a different and defiant footballing world.

They didn't shift tickets on Saturday partly because the rest of us knew they would both survive, that their struggle was a domestic affair which scarcely concerned the rest of us.

For the rest of the summer, though, they are big-time. Their distinctiveness and their passion will draw the full houses and provide the authentic flavour of championship.