ON GAELIC GAMES:SEASON'S END. It's hard to imagine that further All-Irelands for Kilkenny and Kerry will make the 2009 championships live very long in the memories of those from outside the successful counties, but both triumphs are in their own way emblematic of where the GAA's elite competitions stand in the association's 125th year

It’s significant that the first decade of the 21st century, which ushered in the era of the qualifiers and dispensed with the absolutism of sudden death as a format (allowing that hurling began the evolution in 1996), has seen the traditional powers so dominant in football and hurling.

The scale of Kilkenny’s supremacy is vivid – seven All-Irelands in a decade and not one of them achieved with the assistance of a second chance. It’s not even team of the decade stuff because just two of the 2000 side started earlier this month against Tipperary. What it does underline, however, is the primacy of the developmental process.

At the very start of this decade, frustrated at the poor conversion rate of Leinster minor titles into All-Irelands, county chair Ned Quinn (now county secretary) decided to establish a development board.

He approached Brendan O’Sullivan, a respected figure in hurling who had managed Kilkenny to minor and under-21 All-Irelands and been part of a similarly successful senior management in the early 1980s, to chair the new body and asked playing legend Pat Henderson to serve as its secretary.

A side effect of the initiative was to identify a whole cadre of coaches. Initially, the board asked 40 former intercounty players, most with All-Ireland medals, if they would be willing to give eight nights a year to coaching underage hurlers.

It’s pretty well known at this stage that 27 replied positively.

Having revamped their structures, the county managed to establish an assembly line of underage talent. This decade, Kilkenny have won three minor All-Irelands and four under-21s. Whereas it’s true to say the county’s senior successes haven’t always been challenged by a particularly competitive environment, Kilkenny themselves are part of shaping that environment.

On a more optimistic note, enhanced competition at senior level could be boosted if Galway were also able to implement structures that could translate their status as Kilkenny’s main opposition at underage level onto the big stage. Maybe the new involvement in Leinster will help in realising that.

It’s long been lamented that the qualifiers system arrived a decade too late for hurling and that in the 1990s the greater spread of competition would have led to hugely exciting championships.

Then again, taking football’s evolution into account, maybe hurling’s golden age in the 1990s mightn’t have happened had Offaly, Clare and Wexford all had to beat their traditional tormentors more than once in a season. Although Clare can point to having had to do just that against Tipperary in 1997 during the original “back door” dispensation, the impact would have been perhaps greater had the same feat been required in the season of the team’s inaugural success two years previously.

If the power of Kilkenny has ploughed through the hurling championships relatively oblivious to who gets second chances, Kerry’s decade in football has been qualitatively different.

The county’s five All-Irelands in that period emulates the achievement of Mick O’Dwyer’s great team of the 1980s, but that side, like Kilkenny’s current hurlers, were clearly the best team in the country and but for the slip-ups of 1982 and ’83 would have strung together nine successive All-Irelands – and if that’s too hypothetical a concept, seven in nine years still carries a fair impact.

Kerry’s modern supremacy has been in a way more impressive, as it represents a triumph of continuity and application, having been guided by three different managements. It also rests on a pioneering radicalisation of a typical season’s preparation, as two of the All-Irelands (two of the last three) have been won through the qualifiers.

After nine years of the qualifier system, the All-Ireland has been won more often by teams taking the long way around than by provincial champions. Halfway through the decade, after successive wins by Armagh, Tyrone and Kerry, the conventional wisdom was that the best way to an All-Ireland football title was to win all of your matches.

Now that’s not so clear. Speaking with an almost eerie prescience last May, former Mayo and Clare manager John Maughan observed about the qualifier system: “I think the back door has run its course. Kerry and Tyrone

are not as focused on the provincial championships and certainly wouldn’t be distraught at the prospect of losing in them.

“Kerry will want Darragh Ó Sé sharp and fit for the key phase of the championship, from mid-August to the third Sunday in September, and both themselves and Tyrone will aim to be hitting the sweet spot at that time.”

It was just caprice that got in the way of that forecast. Cork’s emergence in football meant the semi-final pairings were going to be particularly influential this year and as Tyrone and Cork both won their provinces, they met in the first semi-final – leaving Kerry with a particularly negotiable barrier in Meath.

Would Jack O’Connor’s team have beaten Tyrone? Perhaps they would, as the Ulster champions looked a bit jaded, but there’s no doubt that given the option Kerry would have been more than happy to avail of the draw as it emerged.

Tyrone will nurture that warm feeling of having returned a 3-0 verdict in the county’s three championship contests with Kerry this decade, but the All-Ireland champions play a longer game. They get to finals frequently, win more than they lose and move on.

A friend from the county previewed last weekend by exuberantly declaring that, whatever the potential twists and turns of the match, it was simply great to be going up to Croke Park in September for a crack at the All-Ireland.

In a way that was the essential difference on Sunday. Kerry played with an enthusiasm for the contest, totally comfortable in their ability to take on and meet the challenge.

Cork played with the inhibitions of those dreading the past rather than with the zest of a generation creating a different future.

And that’s why history repeated itself.