At some point during the tempests and glories of last Sunday's grand theatre between Galway and Tyrone, a thought struck Paul Clancy - this is what we play for.

His personal dual at centre back with Brian McGuigan, Tyrone's lissom and smart centre forward, was one of the many intriguing footnotes in a game that transcended the general qualifications of the league.

In Omagh, both teams took to the task of beating each other with a fury that surprised even themselves and they managed to dial into the same frequency in Salthill. All over the field, mini epics were played out.

McGuigan had put on a classic display of centre forward play in the drawn game, but Clancy shaded affairs in Salthill with a clean and skilful role of creation and containment. He balanced his defensive duties with a natural and proven attacking instinct. His stability and craft in the number six position that has proved so troublesome for Galway this season was one of the many alms that the restorative series of games against Tyrone seemed to bring to Galway.

Clancy was satisfied with his day, but cringed as he relived one particular sequence in which he cleared a ball straight into McGuigan's arms. After moving the ball on, McGuigan trotted back to where his marker stood with a sympathetic grin.

"Could ya not see I was wearing a white jersey? the Tyrone man asked. Clancy might have smiled, but he had no time for conversation. Talking, he decided, was a luxury best left to forwards.

Clancy's return to the Galway colours has certainly coincided with an interesting period in the evolution of the team. Having spent the winter travelling all over the southern hemisphere and across the United States, there was a the true comedian's timing to his return to the first team - at centre back - for the infamous rout by Wexford in Tuam.

Part of his reason for travelling was that after last summer's championship, he just felt totally bombed out. All through June and July, he was dogged with the sensation that even though he was 26 years old, he felt twice that. He woke up feeling exhausted and came to dread training days. Other guys on the team spoke of experiencing a similar sense of heaviness and torpor.

If anything, Clancy felt he trained with sadistic vigour last summer to try and shake off the lethargy, to try and feel light again and there were days when the team hit a perfect pitch.

In one challenge game against Cavan, they landed something like 11 goals. In another against Donegal, they won at a canter. And yet, when the counties met in the All-Ireland quarter-final, it was Donegal who prevailed.

"I remember saying that night in Castlebar that I had no interest in doing this again. I was completely despondent. I hated it. That was the immediate fallout. Guys felt like they just had enough. And the rationale was based on the fact that we couldn't figure out what more we could do.

"Like, I know there were nights at training when John (O'Mahony) must just have wanted to take us off the field and deep freeze us for a week because we were just flying. We could feel it. But then on the field, it got stuck inside of us. We couldn't get the performance out of us."

So, with O'Mahony's blessing, Clancy took off with a few friends. They followed Ireland for the rugby World Cup and then parted ways, with Clancy trekking on his own, meeting up with backpackers along the international slipstreams of hostels and economy bus routes and cheap restaurants. It occurred to him for the first time in his life there was an alternative existence in which Gaelic football had no part and, for a while, that cheered him.

He met with Europeans and Americans who were escaping the travails of their own lives for a few months and he began resting his bones. When he spoke of home, he never mentioned his sporting life because trying to explain an All-Ireland final to people who never heard of Gaelic football would have made him sound like a fruitcake. It might have made him sound scary.

Besides, it was easier just to forget, except when he received emails from Joe Bergin or Mikey Donnellan assuring him that while he was catching a tan, his old Galway pals were putting in the slow miles and the gym work. By the time he got to San Francisco, he felt renewed and actually tingled with excitement when he called O'Mahony and heard the familiar, calm voice at the other end of the line.

"I waited because I didn't want to be ringing up saying, 'oh, hi, John, I still don't know how I feel about the game any more'. I wanted to be certain that I was still prepared to give it my all. And by San Francisco, my feeling was that if I didn't return, I would regret it down the line. Why not play when you still can?"

And so he came back to Ireland after a last rage in Boston and was gently drafted back into the team, earning his first start of the year at centre back against Wexford.

"Apocalypse Now," is Clancy's perfect description of that day. There was a real day of judgment feel about it, with Wexford weaving spells of true beauty in the lashing rain and Galway looking like a ghost team under baleful skies.

"It probably looked as if we were not talking to each other, as if we had fallen out or something. What people don't realise though is that guys on our team are always in decent form, even on the days we don't go well. But even that morning, you knew there was something not right. You could just see guys looking out the window and it was horrible, a surreal day - like it was nearly dark in the second half - and guys just didn't fancy it.

"I guess we can be a bit of a moody team that way. Like, guys have to be on the same wavelength for things to happen and we demand fairly high standards of ourselves. Even at half-time, we were intent on clawing our way back into it. We were three goals down, but, on our day, we would feel capable of recovering that. And then they came out and got 1-2 without reply. It would have been funny if it wasn't so embarrassing."

Then came the recriminations that reminded Clancy that, in the politics of Galway football, life is never a beach - in fact, there is no beach. The usual accusations were presented: the defence was shot, the team finished, x was fighting with y, the team had been drinking in Caltra for the week.

"Outlandish stuff. It is one of the things we got used to in this team. Rarely a week passes when you don't hear a rumour of some dressing-room bust-up. Like, I have been told of fights that I was involved in dressing-rooms. And I try to explain, 'look, eh, I was there. That didn't happen'. It's got to the stage where it is just amusing now.

"But after the Wexford game, we deserved every bit of criticism we got and we deserved the beating we got. It clarified matters for us because it made us ask ourselves if we wanted to play on as a team or not. We had been a fairly good team over the years and we didn't want to let things slide and just be remembered as the crowd that were responsible for Galway's second worst beating in history. And there would have been no honour lost if lads had wanted to walk away. But nobody did."

After benefiting from a freakish sequence of results on the last day of the league, Galway teetered between relegation and safety before qualifying for the semi-finals on points difference. They beat Cavan by a point in a game that Clancy was sent off in with 20 minutes to go.

That result set up the attractive semi-final date with the All-Ireland-champions and, after an astonishing 180 minutes of football, it was clear that Galway had not lost their verve or capacity for thrilling crowds like few teams can.

It also confirmed Clancy's potential as a centre back. Being asked to play in a position that seemed to mete out cursed luck on any Galway player who played there did not faze Clancy. He played there in a few championship games with his club, Moycullen, but that experiment ended when Tommy Carton ofTuam took 2-1 off him.

The thought of giving it a go for Galway appealed to him though. Clancy is no stranger to positional switches. He has lined out across the half-forward line and played at full forward against Séamus Moynihan in the 2000 All-Ireland final.

"He is the ultimate defender," praises Clancy. "I don't think he really cares about forwards, it's just about the ball and his space. Like, some backs would think, oh he's not my man - if you have the ball and Moynihan is near you, you become his man. He has a serious work-rate and he doesn't lose the ball. He just wants it more. I remember going for a few balls with him and you have to match his mental intensity. And if you break even after that you are doing fairly well."

Clancy's philosophy as a defender is to try and do what he hated defenders doing to him as a forward. He shadows them closely, tries to turn them from their favourite side and keeps them honest by breaking forward. Still, in his soul he remains a creative player and when McGuigan gave him the slink in Omagh and fired a gorgeous point with the outside of his boot, Clancy watched it on his knees and couldn't help enjoying the aesthetics of the movement.

"It was a hell of a score. Not that I was going to tell him that though."

It was precisely the kind of point that Clancy has become celebrated for scoring - distant and effortless and rousing. His most famous score to date is the winning point he fired against Armagh in the last seconds of the All-Ireland quarter-final of 2001. It was an archetypal piece of Galway improvisation - a steal from nothing by Michael Donnellan, a casual one-handed flick and then a thunderous kick from Clancy.

"I think it was inside the 45-metre line, but for a few weeks afterwards, it was outside the 65," he laughs.

Winning that year's All-Ireland compensated for the ruined summer Clancy endured in 1998, when he broke his leg against Leitrim and was fit enough only to make a very late appearance in that year's long awaited All-Ireland victory against Kildare.

Clancy, just 20 then, had opted out of the panel the previous year as his family weathered through a sad year following the death of Pauric, their father and husband and a bright influence on the football interests of his sons.

Paul hardly touched a football in 1997, but returned to it with singular concentration for O'Mahony's first season in charge. O'Mahony has been demonstrably loyal to the Moycullen forward over the years and has been repaid in kind. Clancy is so smooth a player he can play anywhere without altering the team dynamic.

Although his flair is not as extrovert as that of Joyce or Donnellan, his range of abilities makes him one of the most complete players on the field. Whether this means he will resume his career in attack or become the lynchpin of the Galway defence remains to be seen. Either way, he is not too fussed. He is just playing happy again.

"Pádhraic Joyce has this theory about the bench. When you get to the end of your career, the first time you find yourself sitting, you start to wonder. The second time you are sitting, you know you are done. We kind of laugh about it and tell ourselves there won't be a third time. You have to know when it's time to leave."

Only when he reviewed his football life from the far end of the globe could Paul Clancy see that his time was not now. The further he walked away from the game, the more clearly it called and now it makes sense again.